The volunteer team behind Jellyfin, the open source media server, has published its second State of the Fin update, confirming that the long-running 10.x versioning scheme is finally on its way out. With 10.11.x acting as the last release in that line, the next major version will jump straight to 12.0, eliminating what the team calls a redundant prefix that had outlived its usefulness.
The 12.0 release is built on top of a massive performance PR that has now landed in master and is shipping through the weekly unstable builds available via the Docker unstable tag. The change targets slow queries that have plagued folder-based libraries such as home videos, photos, and books, with additional improvements to collections, music libraries, playlists, and homepage load times. Version 12.0 also adds support for multiple versions of episodes inside a series library, fixes EPG handling for the Schedules Direct API, and resolves errors that occurred when restructuring media libraries. Tracking for outstanding release blockers lives on the Jellyfin 12.0 project board, while early planning for 13.0 has begun in a meta discussion focused on deeper scanner optimization.
The team also rolled out a new LLM/AI policy in response to a flood of AI-authored pull requests. The policy does not ban AI use outright, but it requires contributors to understand the code they submit and to write their own responses to maintainer feedback rather than acting as a relay for a chatbot. The maintainers describe burnout as a real problem, attributing delays in client and server work to the combination of low-quality AI submissions, rising support load, and user hostility when fixes do not land quickly.
On the client side, Jellyfin Desktop is getting a ground-up rewrite that swaps Qt and QtWebEngine for Chromium Embedded Framework, and replaces the legacy libmpv pipeline with the same modern stack used by standalone mpv. The new architecture enables vo=gpu-next acceleration and native HDR playback on Wayland, macOS, and Windows, and is expected to eventually absorb the functionality of Jellyfin MPV Shim. Development builds add Linux AppImage and Windows ARM packages. Elsewhere, Jellyfin for Android 2.6.4 patched a regression caused by the 10.11.7 server, Jellyfin for Android TV shipped home screen and screensaver fixes, Jellyfin for Roku 3.1.9 added playback speed controls and trickplay options, and Jellyfin for Tizen is now available directly through the Samsung Tizen Store for Tizen 6 and later.
Two entirely new clients are in early development as well: a prototype for Amazon's Vega OS, the platform used on Fire TV Stick models released since 2025, and a more advanced client for Titan OS, the smart TV operating system found on Philips televisions. With 12.0 approaching its release candidate phase, the team is also pausing further breaking API changes to give third-party client developers a stable target before work on 13.0 ramps up.
