Looking for a way to broadcast notifications of new media to a whatsapp group, which I use for requests and new media. It just me, kids and friends (10 users).

Not all have Discord, so that option is out (however well documented).

Anyone seen anything on this?

Greatly appreciated.

Side note; Been running my server for around 5 months. Have all the usuall plugins installed, custom branding, LiveTV through an iptv service, schedule, recordings etc etc. Absolutely loving it. It's just perfect. It's grown rapidly. Over 160 Movies and 90 odd TV Shows and counting. I've already bought two extra HDD's to accommodate. It literally never fails. Any client, flawless, even on the fixed tablet in the car. Now if only I could get notifications via WhatApp to save me doing this manually with every new episode/film. Complete automation is the goal.

Edit: my bad spelling.

top 20 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] macgregor 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you will have trouble getting a notification specifically to WhatsApp because it's a proprietary app without an official public API (from what I can tell). The top relevant results when looking for WhatsApp notifications just generally were more proprietary services mostly targeted at businesses. Not a promising sign. I found some claims of open source whatsapp apis, mostly JavaScript/browser based but I have no idea if they work (reliably) or how easy it would be to integrate with Jellyfin. I could be wrong, but I didn't find many promising results after about 10-15 minutes and as a software engineer I basically google tech shit for a living.

Your best bet is one of the options spelled out with the Jellyfin webhook plugin or Jellyseer (which looks like basically the same options at a glance):

Some of those would allow your users to get notifications by installing a special client on their phone. If you want to selfhost try Ntfy, if you don't try Pushbullet ($5 OTP). so for example you can run a Ntfy service on the same machine as Jellyfin, webhook Jellyfin events to Ntfy, then your users can install the Ntfy mobile app on their phone and subscribe to events from your selfhosted Ntfy instance (or something close to that, I haven't set up Ntfy yet but had plans to).

[–] Nostromo 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Goodness me. Thanks so much for your detailed reply. I appreciate the time spent looking into this and the great suggestions. I will look into all of the above. Jellyseerr/Ntfy looks like the best option. Thanks again.

[–] macgregor 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jellyseer seems pretty cool if you're managing a media server for people. I just manage Jellyfin for myself so I haven't looked that deeply in to it.

Good luck!

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks!

[–] 22SharkNose 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could add Ombi to your software stack. It supports multiple push notification providers (WhatsApp is included I believe). Bonus is it will let your users add requests which can either be admin approved, or automatically added to your respective *arr downloader.

[–] Nostromo 2 points 1 year ago

Oh that's a good shout. I'll definitely look into that. Thank you very much!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

interesting, I could use that for telegram groups, if this is available. less talking to my family in person :-)

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. Telegram was suggested to me as a solution in the official Jellyfin Discord. Should be well documented? (I never looked tbh as convincing all my users to download telegram would be difficult; the elderly hate change and I'd have to go and set it up for them and then teach them how to use it)

[–] breadsmasher 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you using anything like sonarr or radarr?

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Appreciate the reply. Yes. Its on the list for automated request/download. Was holding out for a WhatsApp option first, but as that seems impossible, I'll be going down the sonarr/radarr route now.

Thanks.

[–] breadsmasher 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My follow up was - sonarr and radarr have a lot of integrations. Unsure of whatsapp specifically but Ive used a discord bot with mine to do what you are describing.

*arr does the organisation of media etc, it knows when things are finished and available. It then notifies clients - jellyfin, and then any chat clients it has integration for (couldnt find anything relating to whatsapp however)

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had considered going down the road of Notification listener (windows toast notifications). Sanitise the output and pipe into pywhatkit to generate a Whatsapp group post.

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago

Scrub that. Someone just bought to my attention building a WhatsApp bot in Node Red. I can then use the webhook notifier in Jellyfin to send events to it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

might be possible using homeasistent ofisiall integraton for jellyfin and for telegram or hacs integrations for whatsapp and messenger

[–] Nostromo 1 points 1 year ago

That sounds interesting. Will look into that.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[–] clavismil 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry not an answer about the notification issue.. Wanted to ask how you managed to get work without issues for every client? What format/codec is you media? Are you transcoding everything? I got some issues with smart TVs.

[–] Nostromo 2 points 1 year ago

I've had an issue with an LG smart TV (not really an LG, its a re-brand). The web browser was horrifically slow and it flat out refused to play anything. It has very limited processing resources. I was planning on side loading the jellyfin client for LG TV's but that was all dropped in favour of a chromecast. Instantly solved the problem (and they're quite cheap on social media marketplaces)

Other than that, I've never had an issue with any client.

My media is a mix of pretty much everything available. 264, 265, avi etc etc. I occasionally have an issue with 265 media, stuttering. Easily solved by deleting and redownloading a 264 version. Transcoding (or not, dependant on client) is all handled automatically by Jellyfin.

Hope that helps?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think WhatsApp's always been pretty hard to call from other sources than the official client. There's no form of open API at all.
Last time I checked the Matrix bridge for WhatsApp used Android emulation for the official app to get it working. Maybe try that if you absolutely have to.