State of the Fin 2026-05-24 | Jellyfin

Skip to main content<br>Welcome to the second edition of State of the Fin! This update will be slightly different to the previous one as we don't have as many large updates to announce (yet)! Still, we want to keep you informed on what is happening and what the Jellyfin development team are working on. Please enjoy, and contribute through our standard channels if you have questions or comments.

Project Updates​

Versioning​

As mentioned in the last State of the Fin, we're dropping the major version "10" from our naming scheme. With 10.11.x being the final release branch to use it, the next major release will move directly to 12.0. The primary reason for this is to reduce confusion about what a "major" version is and eliminate the redundancy of a never-changing 10. version prefix.

LLM/"AI" Policy​

As with pretty much every open source project, we have been inundated with AI-authored pull requests of varying quality. This has vastly increased the amount of work the team has on their plate. To that end, an LLM/AI Policy has been created to try and help set standards. The tl;dr is AI use isn't completely forbidden in pull requests/code submissions, however you must understand HOW it does what it does, and any posts to a pull request/issue should be written by the user. You cannot function as a go-between between your AI and our questions/comments, just copy-pasting whatever the AI tells you. For more information, please read the LLM/"AI" developmental policy we have published.

The Jellyfin Team is made up of a lot of different people, and everyone has different levels of acceptance of/interest in code that an AI agent has contributed to. This policy has been made to try and help find a path that everyone can at least appreciate, even if they don't fully agree.

Burnout / Remember the Person​

Jellyfin has been growing quickly as the landscape around us matures and changes. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is great that Jellyfin is so popular and loved by so many, however the increased support requests, combined with the AI code submissions, have led to burnout at various levels of the development and admin team. Abuse from users when something isn't working or a change isn't accepted only increases the loss of motivation. This has already led to delays in client and server improvements.

Please remember Jellyfin is open source and is written by volunteers. There are real people doing the work, and they're doing this for the love of the project. Yelling at them/insulting them will not make anything happen faster, and is actually more likely to delay fixes or improvements.

If you'd like to get involved in helping fellow users, hang out in the standard Matrix/Discord channels, or look at the forums/subreddit and volunteer answers when you think the question is something you know. Straight AI searching and copy-paste answering aren't good responses and are explicitly banned by the aforementioned LLM policy, but if it's something you have dealt with, please contribute! The more people who help answer the easy questions, the more we can allow the devs to work on the hard stuff.

And of course, if you want to contribute code, we welcome it! Bug fixes are always welcome as-is; but features require a bit more work and a policy that we are still in the process of defining. But if you want to work on a feature, the short answer is: please ask us before you start implementing it and work with the team on a full design/scope discussion to help ensure your work will be accepted!

Development Updates​

Activity by Month0150300450600MayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecJanFebMarAprMay: 343 prs mergedJun: 379 prs mergedJul: 256 prs mergedAug: 292 prs mergedSep: 344 prs mergedOct: 434 prs mergedNov: 271 prs mergedDec: 417 prs mergedJan: 280 prs mergedFeb: 182 prs mergedMar: 364 prs mergedApr: 339 prs mergedMay: 421 issues closedJun: 441 issues closedJul: 297 issues closedAug: 331 issues closedSep: 398 issues closedOct: 504 issues closedNov: 326 issues closedDec: 494 issues closedJan: 366 issues closedFeb: 238 issues closedMar: 478 issues closedApr: 489 issues closedMay: 50 contributorsJun: 61 contributorsJul: 48 contributorsAug: 46 contributorsSep: 50 contributorsOct: 63 contributorsNov: 59 contributorsDec: 75 contributorsJan: 62 contributorsFeb: 48 contributorsMar: 73 contributorsApr: 72 contributorsPRs MergedIssues ClosedContributors<br>What's New​

We've continued pushing bug and security fixes to the stable release. Following the 10.11.10 release, development attention has largely shifted toward finalizing 12.0 ahead of the upcoming release candidate phase. A few items still need to be addressed before we can ship RC1: Jellyfin 12.0

The Performance PR which forms the foundation for much of the work in 12.0, has been merged into master and is now part of the weekly unstable releases. These are published every Monday, though we may push additional out-of-band builds for a while to support...