> "My media content had been pushed aside into a submenu while the app promotes its own streaming media and premium services instead."
This is my biggest pet-peeve coming from Linux world. In Linux the music players you find bundled with different distros are simple, but they just work.
However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
This is a fairly ridiculous situation IMHO (well, solitaire in Windows getting ads/online is slightly more, but I'll never go there) since a music player that fulfills my needs is pretty easy: show a list of artists, play either the whole artist or a single album in shuffle mode.
> However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, […]; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here.
Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.
Most media players I've used work like that.
The application reopens where you last left off,
so it is not like the Apple Music "Explore" or "Listen Now" page is shown on every launch
to push the service on you.
I think the complaint makes sense in relation to the Apple Music sidebar items,
but considering that there are users who want to use Apple Music,
how would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar?
I think having the option to hide it would be enough to alleviate it, but apparently one cannot,
so that's a point against Apple here.
> and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
Tell it which directories to search (if its defaults are not to your liking) and all your local music is front and center -- and no "streaming services" anywhere in the player.
I suppose I understand the reasons people prefer Jellyfin. But on the small chance of liking a commercial product, Plex is truly dead simple for my parents. They have an AppleTV. They signed up. I share it with them via their registered email address. And they’re in. It was as simple a process as I could hope for.
That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.
I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.
This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.
Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.
Plex seems to regularly add new features which I really have no use for but makes it relatively easy to turn them off if you want.
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
My pet peeve with plex is they aren't really focusing on the fundamentals.
Checkout this issue [1]. A 2 year old request to support a newer codec, AV1, with seemingly no support in sight.
Or you've got the fact that plex's transcoding STILL only targets h264 (and gives limited options for bitrate/resolution targets). Most hardware support H.265 (and some newer hardware supports H.266 and AV1).
It's a product that was originally built on serving a media library and it's pushed most of us to working around it while the business is clearly focusing on other priorities.
I’ve stopped using Plex-like stuff. I don’t really need it because transcoding isn’t as relevant as it was before. Pretty much every device I own can play h265 without CPU overhead.
What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.
Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.
I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself?
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
Plex lost me when they became obsessed with trying to put advertisements in front of my grandparents when all they want to do is watch Mash on my plex server.
I've only seen ads in Plex when watching the streaming services they have integrated, which is expected. Those services need to pay for their content somehow.
I agree with the author here - I've used Plex for 5 years now and have recently felt the heat of their drastic UI changes, and the way they are now forcing everyone to "signup" for their service.
My servers have gotten incredibly difficult to find since they are now in a weird submenu, and whenever I see the homepage it confuses the hell out of me when I try to pick up my content where I left it off last time since now there is a lot of Plex's own promoted content carelessly interspersed everywhere.
Whenever I try to ask my wife or friends to use my Plex server, they end up getting confused while navigating to find our locally hosted content. All of this only proves that Plex as a company is trying real hard to push their own content and services and lost the touch of what they originally intended to make as a product in the first place. I am glad I never bought their lifetime pass. Goodbye Plex and hello Jellyfin.
Plex' Android TV app (ATV) is a travesty in regards to pretty much every feature that matters.
From broken playback state tracking, "currently watching" that just won't go away (obvious local state management issues), subtitles that randomly won't show up (no matter what you do), un-configurable +30s/-10s skip options, outright crashes (that toss the local state of whatever you were doing), fun with HDR playback (good luck, 0 handholding. You just have to make all the stars align yourself) and many, many more problems are routine.
Despite all this though, it is (or at least was 9~ months ago, when I made the switch) so much better than Emby (and sorta, by extension, Jellyfin -- which was much worse) on the same platform that it's astounding.
I remember being super impressed that metadata matching was mostly working for a predominantly ASPAC focused library. Library management in general is much better, now that I think about it.
The subtitle timing is also broken. Strangely when I cast the same video to my ATV I get better results than using the native app.
In general, on all Plex apps I've had a lot of issues with 4K content and Surround downmixing. You can configure an audio boost option for downmixing in the options but even then it's still barely usable.
The only reason I still use Plex is that they have (native) apps on nearly every device me and my friends have (tv's, playstation etc.).
I remember starting with XBMC, which had the most beautiful theme's/skins that were really well optimised for the console experience, and there were many of them, all for free.
And now I'm paying for a Plex pass and everything is becoming more clunky and less usable each year, such a shame.
Wow, I did exactly this yesterday.
Went super smoothly, and Android, Google TV clients work fine, as does Chromecast. Android Auto support not great but at least did play the music I told it to which is the main thing I guess.
Not any good desktop clients that aren't Electron garbage, but Plex is no better here.
First party docs for setting up Nginx in front of Jellyfin were Really Freaking Good. Like Arch Wiki levels of good.
Put the lot on a Tailscale IP and now I have access to my Jellyfin from anywhere - including, surprisingly, from my chromecast where the the Tailscale app installed without a hitch.
There's an interesting comparison actually between Plex and Tailscale.. both are sorta-in-the-universe-of-open-source-but-not-actually... but I know which one I trust and which one can go and get bent.
I actually run Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. I would like to only run Jellyfin, but unfortunately some devices will not have jellyfin, but will have plex and/or emby. The main reason I personally still use Plex (or sometimes Emby) even though I am running Jellyfin with all the exact same stuff -- is because Jellyfin sucks at live TV / iptv. It's interface is complete trash and I can't seem to get a good "guide" going like I can with Plex or Emby. If that can be resolved then I'd definitely only ever use Jellyfin.
This all feels like it should be 800x less of an issue because phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.
Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.
The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.
Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
>Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard
At first I thought this was sarcasm...
Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.
>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB
The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files
They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.
SMB would not do any of this.
>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale
> phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.
This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.
Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.
Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.
SMB has been a huge transmission vector for viruses over the years, that's why some ISPs block it by default (its security is terrible).
And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").
Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.
(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)
Phones and tablets can access windows shares just fine. You just need a file manager that supports it. Regardless, direct playing files from a share, doesn't come close to matching the UX a media server provides.
Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.
Moved from Plex to Jellyfin about a month ago. While it obviously isn't as polished as Plex (yet), it has come a long way in the last few years. I remember trying it about 2 years ago and the experience wasn't nearly as good.
Biggest problem for me was recognizing anime, Plex usually does a good job with it but Jellyfin doesn't. My solution is just to rename (or rather, create hardlinks with proper file names and structure) with Sonarr.
Second biggest problem has been the Android TV client. I find it clunky and the built-in video player doesn't support HDR. You can use external player (like VLC) or set up Kodi with Jellyfin add-on which I've done, but it's still not as smooth experience as with Plex.
Overall I find it better than Plex, with active community pushing new updates constantly.
I've considered moving from Plex to Jellyfin (or some other offering in the space), but I don't think anything can really compete with Plex.
Plex, for me, required quite a bit of fiddling, but once you get it working it works _very_ well. There are decent-quality apps on every platform you want to use. There's a whole lot of software that integrates with Plex from things like requesting/adding new media to monitoring/analyzing Plex server usage.
Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:
- It does a very good job at matching media
- It's very easy to share access with others
- It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex!
- I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue
Plex doesn't have the smoothest UX. You have to understand some technical concepts to use it effectively, e.g. sometimes I have to force a transcode when streaming an incompatible format. I have been very frustrated with Plex because of this.
I do wish that Plex would stop working on features that few use. I suppose this is a hard thing to do when they're working on a product that is so heavily associated with piracy.
I dunno, the things you say about Plex I would also say about jellyfin: requires a bit of fiddling, works very well, not always perfect. Jellyfin has bugs, but it's free and works for my use cases, and improves quickly. I like that I can, and have, compiled jellyfin from source when there was a bugfix for one of the features I use that hadn't made it into a point release yet.
I think all software comes with trade-offs and frustrations. It sounds like, for my uses, Plex would trade in a different set of frustrations plus cost money and be closed source.
So I guess it depends what you mean by "compete with" Plex, because for me, it's more like I haven't found anything that competes with jellyfin.
- It does a very good job at matching media - It's very easy to share access with others - It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex! - I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue
Jellyfin does this for free. I wanted to be able to create multiple accounts in Plex - but this needs a subscription or lifetime pass.
Jellyfin also does Movies, Music, and i have loaded a few training video's on it as well.
At the end of the day you can see where Plex is heading - Sell lifetime subs and then try to further monetize the customers to pay for monthly expenses Plex faces running the service... So i went to Jellyfin.
I used to love plex. Now I simply dread the quickly-approaching day when they move all my actual media under three submenus (from its current position of being two submenus away) and I am forced to migrate away. At this point in time, i am prepared to pay them to NEVER EVER change the ui, never shove another streaming shit in my face, and just update for new codecs and security fixes. Screw them for ruining such a useful tool!
I recently got my own server, and I installed Jellyfin. The payment part of plex would not have been an issue, but all the remote parts are. I’m not selfhosting because I want to login through a remote website. Let me buy the software and give me a license key, like with desktop software.
The Jellyfin Android TV app is pretty much okay for me. The browsing interface seems to default to a phone UI, but that was easily fixed.
Tried Jellyfin, but it doesn’t seem to have the capability to stream directly to my TV, it always wants to transcode it which strips away all the 4K and HDR niceties. While Plex would try its best to preserve the original stream and only transcode what the TV can’t support.
Also Plex’s clients are more polished, it actually feels like I’m browsing my own Netflix.
You can always turn off third party content in Plex (by unpinning them). I only use Plex locally so maybe that’s why I’ve been missing all the cloudy bloat lol.
I need to make this jump at some point. I can cope with the money-grubbing UI changes but the Plex App for smart TVs and consoles is by far the worst piece of trash software I've ever used and certainly the worst I still use. It crashes constantly, it displays my progress in a video yet still restarts it from the beginning when I hit Resume, and it has absolutely no idea how to regulate its own performance. It will happily get so bogged down trying to apparently use a bitrate that's too high it takes over thirty seconds for the Back button to stop the video and return to the menu. It's not 2002 anymore, your video player should be able to tell when it's locking up every five seconds.
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
This is my biggest pet-peeve coming from Linux world. In Linux the music players you find bundled with different distros are simple, but they just work.
However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
This is a fairly ridiculous situation IMHO (well, solitaire in Windows getting ads/online is slightly more, but I'll never go there) since a music player that fulfills my needs is pretty easy: show a list of artists, play either the whole artist or a single album in shuffle mode.
Attempt 1: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1364892370509127681
Attempt 2: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1578720636645826560
[+] [-] least|3 years ago|reply
https://swinsian.com/
https://colibri-lossless.com/
https://cog.losno.co/
https://vox.rocks/
[+] [-] SyrupThinker|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.
Most media players I've used work like that. The application reopens where you last left off, so it is not like the Apple Music "Explore" or "Listen Now" page is shown on every launch to push the service on you.
I think the complaint makes sense in relation to the Apple Music sidebar items, but considering that there are users who want to use Apple Music, how would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar? I think having the option to hide it would be enough to alleviate it, but apparently one cannot, so that's a point against Apple here.
[+] [-] abawany|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwg|3 years ago|reply
For Android, give this one a try:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...
Tell it which directories to search (if its defaults are not to your liking) and all your local music is front and center -- and no "streaming services" anywhere in the player.
[+] [-] kennend3|3 years ago|reply
Load your music into "Music" and it is all there and not "hidden in a sub-menu". ITunes is terrible, but "Music" isnt bad.
Has items on the left for "recently added, or "Songs" can sort by ratings, search, etc.
[+] [-] nortonham|3 years ago|reply
also, with brew or macports you can install pretty much any audio player you want
[+] [-] ulkesh|3 years ago|reply
That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.
I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.
This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.
[+] [-] colordrops|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|3 years ago|reply
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
[+] [-] apexalpha|3 years ago|reply
So let me just add that I've been using Plex for years to play 4k HDR files for myself and transcoded versions for family and friends.
And it works beautifully!
No complaints really. There's clients for all devices family has, I have all my files, I can share to friends, etc...
Yes, they've also added a new streaming service. I really don't see the issue, just disable it if you don't want it.
For me Plex has always worked fine. Good product.
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
1) go to settings -> online media sources and disable everything.
2) click the ‘More’ button at the bottom left then go to these libraries I shared with you and click three dots —> pin for every one of them
3) go to settings —> Quality —> Video quality and select original so you don’t transcode everything to 720p, 2mbps for no reason
4) go to settings —> Subtitles and enable subtitles so you don’t have to enable manually every time you play a video
[+] [-] cogman10|3 years ago|reply
Checkout this issue [1]. A 2 year old request to support a newer codec, AV1, with seemingly no support in sight.
Or you've got the fact that plex's transcoding STILL only targets h264 (and gives limited options for bitrate/resolution targets). Most hardware support H.265 (and some newer hardware supports H.266 and AV1).
It's a product that was originally built on serving a media library and it's pushed most of us to working around it while the business is clearly focusing on other priorities.
[1] https://forums.plex.tv/t/add-support-for-av1-coding-standard...
[+] [-] jklinger410|3 years ago|reply
They have spent the last few years burying and neutering all of the features that you claim "work fine."
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.
Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.
[+] [-] jghn|3 years ago|reply
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
[+] [-] dualboot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kQq9oHeAz6wLLS|3 years ago|reply
My media is completely ad-free.
[+] [-] princevegeta89|3 years ago|reply
Whenever I try to ask my wife or friends to use my Plex server, they end up getting confused while navigating to find our locally hosted content. All of this only proves that Plex as a company is trying real hard to push their own content and services and lost the touch of what they originally intended to make as a product in the first place. I am glad I never bought their lifetime pass. Goodbye Plex and hello Jellyfin.
[+] [-] Wintereise|3 years ago|reply
From broken playback state tracking, "currently watching" that just won't go away (obvious local state management issues), subtitles that randomly won't show up (no matter what you do), un-configurable +30s/-10s skip options, outright crashes (that toss the local state of whatever you were doing), fun with HDR playback (good luck, 0 handholding. You just have to make all the stars align yourself) and many, many more problems are routine.
Despite all this though, it is (or at least was 9~ months ago, when I made the switch) so much better than Emby (and sorta, by extension, Jellyfin -- which was much worse) on the same platform that it's astounding.
I remember being super impressed that metadata matching was mostly working for a predominantly ASPAC focused library. Library management in general is much better, now that I think about it.
[+] [-] traspler|3 years ago|reply
In general, on all Plex apps I've had a lot of issues with 4K content and Surround downmixing. You can configure an audio boost option for downmixing in the options but even then it's still barely usable.
[+] [-] LASR|3 years ago|reply
For unrelated reasons, I switched my home devices to AppleTVs recently. The Infuse app works very well as a Plex client.
[+] [-] matsimitsu|3 years ago|reply
I remember starting with XBMC, which had the most beautiful theme's/skins that were really well optimised for the console experience, and there were many of them, all for free.
And now I'm paying for a Plex pass and everything is becoming more clunky and less usable each year, such a shame.
[+] [-] runnerup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akdor1154|3 years ago|reply
Not any good desktop clients that aren't Electron garbage, but Plex is no better here.
First party docs for setting up Nginx in front of Jellyfin were Really Freaking Good. Like Arch Wiki levels of good.
Put the lot on a Tailscale IP and now I have access to my Jellyfin from anywhere - including, surprisingly, from my chromecast where the the Tailscale app installed without a hitch.
There's an interesting comparison actually between Plex and Tailscale.. both are sorta-in-the-universe-of-open-source-but-not-actually... but I know which one I trust and which one can go and get bent.
[+] [-] digitalnomad91|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejman5200|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.
The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.
https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider
Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
[+] [-] phpisthebest|3 years ago|reply
At first I thought this was sarcasm...
Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.
>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB
The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files
They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.
SMB would not do any of this.
>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/910766/
[+] [-] GranPC|3 years ago|reply
This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.
Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.
Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.
[+] [-] dinosaurdynasty|3 years ago|reply
And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").
Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.
(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)
[+] [-] discardedrefuse|3 years ago|reply
Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.
[+] [-] hankidotdev|3 years ago|reply
Biggest problem for me was recognizing anime, Plex usually does a good job with it but Jellyfin doesn't. My solution is just to rename (or rather, create hardlinks with proper file names and structure) with Sonarr.
Second biggest problem has been the Android TV client. I find it clunky and the built-in video player doesn't support HDR. You can use external player (like VLC) or set up Kodi with Jellyfin add-on which I've done, but it's still not as smooth experience as with Plex.
Overall I find it better than Plex, with active community pushing new updates constantly.
[+] [-] shepherdjerred|3 years ago|reply
Plex, for me, required quite a bit of fiddling, but once you get it working it works _very_ well. There are decent-quality apps on every platform you want to use. There's a whole lot of software that integrates with Plex from things like requesting/adding new media to monitoring/analyzing Plex server usage.
Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:
- It does a very good job at matching media - It's very easy to share access with others - It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex! - I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue
Plex doesn't have the smoothest UX. You have to understand some technical concepts to use it effectively, e.g. sometimes I have to force a transcode when streaming an incompatible format. I have been very frustrated with Plex because of this.
I do wish that Plex would stop working on features that few use. I suppose this is a hard thing to do when they're working on a product that is so heavily associated with piracy.
[+] [-] drunkpotato|3 years ago|reply
I think all software comes with trade-offs and frustrations. It sounds like, for my uses, Plex would trade in a different set of frustrations plus cost money and be closed source.
So I guess it depends what you mean by "compete with" Plex, because for me, it's more like I haven't found anything that competes with jellyfin.
[+] [-] kennend3|3 years ago|reply
>Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:
- It does a very good job at matching media - It's very easy to share access with others - It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex! - I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue
Jellyfin does this for free. I wanted to be able to create multiple accounts in Plex - but this needs a subscription or lifetime pass.
Jellyfin also does Movies, Music, and i have loaded a few training video's on it as well.
At the end of the day you can see where Plex is heading - Sell lifetime subs and then try to further monetize the customers to pay for monthly expenses Plex faces running the service... So i went to Jellyfin.
[+] [-] dmitrygr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|3 years ago|reply
The Jellyfin Android TV app is pretty much okay for me. The browsing interface seems to default to a phone UI, but that was easily fixed.
[+] [-] vachina|3 years ago|reply
Also Plex’s clients are more polished, it actually feels like I’m browsing my own Netflix.
You can always turn off third party content in Plex (by unpinning them). I only use Plex locally so maybe that’s why I’ve been missing all the cloudy bloat lol.
[+] [-] causality0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSecondMouse|3 years ago|reply