alt Hacker NewsThis is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.
I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.
Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]
1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick
Replies
> "Usually i remember what i was watching"
You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.
Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.
Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.
I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.
Plus the whole *arr stack.
Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.
If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.
If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.