Jellyscrub

About

Jellyscrub is a plugin that generates "trickplay" (Roku .bif) files that are then interpreted by the client and used for bufferless scrubbing image previews.

The trickplay data for a 1:30hr movie with 320x180 thumbnails only takes about 6MB of data when generating an image every 10 seconds. Takes around one - four minutes to generate depending on computer hardware.

Abilities

• No buffering, even over proxies
• Works with web, android, ios client out of the box -- and with desktop client manually
• Customize interval between new images
• Generate trickplay files at multiple target resolutions
• Generate on library scan, as a scheduled task, or whenever they are requested by the client
• Option to save locally to media folder

Limitations

• No options to limit libraries/media that have trickplay files generated

Comparison

Jellyfin Default [SSL, Cloudflare Proxy] (Minimum of 5m Interval):

Jellyscrub [SSL, Cloudflare Proxy] (Default 10s Interval, 320px width):

Jellyscrub on iOS [Single Screenshot, Functions Same as Above]:

Installation

NOTE: The client script will fail to inject automatically into the jellyfin-web server if there is a difference in permission between the owner of the web files (root, or www-data, etc.) and the executor of the main jellyfin-server. This often happens because...

• Docker - the container is being run as a non-root user while having been built as a root user, causing the web files to be owned by root. To solve this, you can remove any lines like User: 1000:1000, GUID:, PID:, etc. from the jellyfin docker compose file.
• Install from distro repositories - the jellyfin-server will execute as jellyfin user while the web files will be owned by root, www-data, etc. This can likely be fixed by adding the jellyfin (or whichecher user your main jellyfin server runs at) to the same group the jellyfin-web folders are owned by. You should only do this if they are owned by a group other than root, and will have to lookup how to manage permissions on your specific distro.
• Alternatively, the script can manually be added to the index.html as described below.

NOTE: If you manually injected the script tag, you will have to manually inject it on every jellyfin-web update, as the index.html file will get overwritten. However, for normal Jellyscrub updates the script tag will not need to be changed as the plugin will return the latest script from /ClientScript

1. Add https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicknsy/jellyscrub/main/manifest.json as a Jellyfin plugin repository
2. Install Jellyscrub from the repository
3. Restart the Jellyfin server
4. If your Jellyfin's web path is set, the plugin should automatically inject the companion client script into the "index.html" file of the web server directory. Otherwise, the line <script plugin="Jellyscrub" version="1.0.0.0" src="/Trickplay/ClientScript"></script> will have to be added at the end of the body tag manually right before </body>. If you have a base path set, change src="/Trickplay/ClientScript" to src="/YOUR_BASE_PATH/Trickplay/ClientScript".
5. Clear your site cookies / local storage to get rid of the cached index file and receive a new one from the server.
6. Change any configuration options, like whether to save in media folders over internal metadata folders.
7. Run a scan (could take much longer depending on library size) or start watching a movie and the scrubbing preview should update in a few minutes.
8. OPTIONAL: See how to get it working on desktop client.