28 ms·

Streama – A self-hosted streaming application with your own media library

374 points by GutenYe 10y ago

Giorgi 10y ago
Either I am blind or this has nothing to do with Plex. Godspeed. Looks really nice.
- chirau 10y ago
  It actually doesn't have anything to do with Plex. They are not even that similar. Somehow the Plex conversation has dictated this thread.
amelius 10y ago
This is great. It would also be nice if you could share media files (over bittorrent perhaps) with a small group of people (e.g., family or friends).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mrmondo 10y ago
Nice to see an open source approach to this, disappointed to see it relies on MySQL though. Plex is a fantastic application for a similar purpose.
tn890 10y ago
How is this better than Plex?
- touristtam 10y ago
  I'd like to know as well. After moving from kodi (ex XBMC) to plex flawlessly, I am wondering what would be the advantage against plex for streaming.
- Numberwang 10y ago
  Is that really a fair question? This has fewer features sure, but should it really have to have equal to or more to even be worth looking at? This looks clean and simple to manage and would cover my needs perfectly.
  - johnward 10y ago
    I don't think asking for a comparison to a current offering is a bad question. It doesn't mean both can't exist. Although this kind of reminds me of Xbox Media Center (XBMC) vs Xbox Media Player (XBMP). At this point I'm willing to give up control over my media for convenience though so maybe my opinion is invalid. I remember spending hours organizing my mp3 collection. Forget that. edit: Apparently XBMC is now Kodi so it actually is a direct competitor.
    - skykooler 10y ago
      I thought Kodi was a fork of XBMC?
      - SlashmanX 10y ago
        XBMC was renamed to Kodi.
- thybag 10y ago
  I had exactly the same thought when I popped over to have a look at their readme. It's odd they don't mention it at all, as at face value it appears both Plex and Streama are both solving the same problem. Would also have been interesting to hear what they view their edge as, as plex is already a pretty mature and powerful codebase, where as this appears to be very new. (I'd guess being open source would probably be their main edge right now)
  - tn890 10y ago
    >I'd guess being open source would probably be their main edge right now Well, if you're looking for an open source alternative to Plex, there's Kodi already.
    - thirdsun 10y ago
      Kodi doesn't solve the problem of having your content available everywhere however.
      - TrisMcC 10y ago
        Emby does, and emby also has an excellent Kodi addon.
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        Kodi supports streaming, and Yatse provides very nice mobile streaming and offline caching.
- koolba 10y ago
  Is Plex FOSS?
  - patrickk 10y ago
    Plex is based on Kodi (formerly XBMC) which is FOSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)
    - dublinben 10y ago
      But Plex itself is not.
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        Indeed, Plex is not. Emby and Kodi are. IIRC the reason Kodi (back when it was called XBMC) switched to GPLv2 is because they got forked by Plex who didn't give back. I wasn't able to find a source on this though.
    - jannes 10y ago
      Only the Plex Home Theater was based on Kodi, but it has been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)#Plex_Home_Theater_.28discontinued.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)#Plex_Home_Thea... Plex apps are 100% closed source as far as I understand.
- psheets 10y ago
  I just switched from PLEX to Emby. Plex started to push Plex.TV down their users throats. Emby does not require any external authentication. https://emby.media/index.html https://emby.media/index.html
  - arghwhat 10y ago
    How is plex.tv, their simple redirection service, pushed down your throat? You don't need to use any of that. I have both running, but unfortunately, the Emby server just burns resources like there was no tomorrow, and you can't really compare the UX at all, hence using Plex.
    - psheets 10y ago
      You have to use it for user authentication which Emby does locally.
      - arghwhat 10y ago
        That's optional. Plex has local account management. The iOS app hides it a bit, but it's there. You of course lose the plex.tv features (plex pass, etc.).
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  From what I can tell: Open source, and no cloud or premium upsells. Running on the JVM is nice too. Besides: https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass-pro/ https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass-pro/ looks both hilarious and sad.
- TrisMcC 10y ago
  Or Emby? https://emby.media/ https://emby.media/ It's open source and has most of the features that plex has.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Only the basic version is open source it seems: > "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Incidentally, the paid features seems to include most of the things that would make me consider a media centre installation, which would seem to make the open source version mostly uninteresting to me at least.
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    Last time I tried Plex and Emby, neither supported gapless playback of music, which makes any listening of classical music excruciating / a non-starter. Is anyone aware of a self-hosted option that does support gapless playback?
    - ryanl-ee 10y ago
      I use Madsonic with the Dsub Android app.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Same, with iSub for iOS and streaming transcode from FLAC to 320Kbps MP3. I find gapless playback only breaks in cases where the content isn't precached and the network is so slow and/or badly affected by latency that the next track hasn't had a chance to start caching before the current one finishes.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  Competition is good. Aside of Plex, there'a also Emby, and Kodi. Each have their + and -. Here's a comparison between the 3 [1]. (Disclaimer: I use Emby.) [1] http://www.htpcbeginner.com/plex-vs-emby-comparison-with-kodi/ http://www.htpcbeginner.com/plex-vs-emby-comparison-with-kod...
Demcox 10y ago
So it's an alternative to Plex? Looks interesting.
the8472 10y ago
browser-based players are not really that great if your collection contains 10bit video, flac audio, ASS subtitles and other stuff that browsers can't handle without transcoding.
- callahad 10y ago
  The next release of Firefox (in two weeks) has native support for FLAC, and in the near future (by the end of March) I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will allow for efficient third party implementations of codecs. We'll get there...
  - the8472 10y ago
    How does webassembly help with pushing 10bit or rec2020 content to the graphics buffer? or rendering at > 60fps? Browsers will always lag behind players which address the output devices more directly. Also webassembly may not be sufficient for some software-decoding on weak devices, it would need GPGPU-acceleration. But as far as I can tell WebCL is dead.
    - callahad 10y ago
      It's true that the Web can't do everything yet, but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts. For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago, using a codec hand-written in portable JavaScript. So it's entirely possible today, WASM just provides a sane path from existing C implementations to the Web.
      - the8472 10y ago
        > but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts My reference point is playback with madVR + xysubfilter. madVR uses various high-quality algorithms for scaling and post-processing that are generally too taxing for CPUs to do in realtime, especially at high resolutions or framerates. Similarly rendering complex subtitles containing vector graphics in realtime onto a high resolution target is also quite demanding. It works on an i7, but I would be skeptical about more anemic devices. So that's where gpu acceleration would help too. > For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago I have not heard about that one before. It seems to be an encoder geared towards realtime streaming. Codecs in realtime configuration generally make some tradeoffs to sacrifice quality and compression to meet their throughput targets. So it's hardly comparable to encoding for archival purposes (h.265 high profile has horrendous encoding times) or high quality playback. > It's true that the Web can't do everything yet But new features hit the market every few years. Native players can address them within months of the new interfaces hitting consumer hardware. Browsers and software running in them are hampered by their need for consensus, having to develop new abstraction layers on top of native features and slow rollout of new features.
Terretta 10y ago
Hello world video hub could be the new hello world blog! But one has only to review the (very frequent) release notes for Plex to see the devil is in the edge cases, not the basics. In the meantime, Plex has a native server app for almost everything, including NAS boxes, and native players shipping with TVs and in game console app stores. It does a good job on both playback and admin UI across a fleet of media hosts for a household of users, and the latest release unlocks hardware encoding across an array of operating systems. There's even a portable HDD + WiFI hub from Western Digital, to take Plex Server and 4TB of media on the go w/ 10 hrs battery life, in the size of a Sony Discman.
- pjc50 10y ago
  While we're on the subject of Plex, does anyone here use it for recording broadcast digital TV (preferably including HD)? I'm always confused about how most htpc systems only make sense for people with massive private ripped/downloaded libraries of media, while in the "golden age of TV" seemingly nobody watches actual TV.
- croon 10y ago
  Agreed. The only thing Plex does badly is subtitles, which both Kodi (of course) and simple players like BSPlayer does well.
  - ascagnel_ 10y ago
    I wonder how much of that is because subtitles themselves are a mess, and it's highly dependent on the environment the player is running in. Some subtitle formats (notably DVD & Blu-Ray, if you're ripping your own content) are actually image formats with timecodes. There are other text-based subtitle formats. If a player (say, the Apple TV) supports one type but not the other, Plex has no other option but to "burn in" the subtitles on playback.
    - netsharc 10y ago
      I found it surprising that DVD subtitles are images, but then I realized it made sense back during the introduction of the DVD, with the crazy world of text encodings. Chances were high that the Elbonian-made player would get the encoding of a subtitle stream wrong and display Mojibake! With images they had a benefit of being able to do fancy things like use different fonts.
basdp 10y ago
So you just rebuild Plex?
- phyushin 10y ago
  I was just about to say the same
freshyill 10y ago
The beauty of Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Plex is that I can view my content just about anywhere and on any device. Free and I pen source is certainly preferable, but I want to watch movies on my Apple TV in my living room. That's the problem I need solved. I suspect it's similar for most people.
- kochthesecond 10y ago
  This is indeed my problem. And I will pay to solve it, eg. In the form of Plex or Netflix
- shoggoth 10y ago
  Plex has an ATV app
  - freshyill 10y ago
    I know. This does not.
- TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
  Netflix/Prime/etc aren't even comparable to a local media library to me. Legal issues aside, a local library can be configured to download the latest episodes of programs I like automatically, and keep an eye out for movies I like the look of, which I can then watch offline at my leisure. Streaming services allows me to browse programs I haven't considered adding to my library, or maybe haven't even heard of, and watch them immediately without having to wait for them to download. They're different use cases for different purposes, and with a few exceptions for hard-to-find stuff that I mostly keep around for nostalgic purposes, streaming is winning. I can't store the programs I want to watch for the cost of a Netflix subscription (a quick calculation shows that it would cost £10 per month in disks alone to fill a 4-bay NAS with 8TB disks, without considering Usenet subscriptions and electricity costs)
djvdorp 10y ago
Good to have more alternatives for Plex and Emby, but without having native apps for almost all architectures in use, mobile apps and Chromecast support it has quite a long way to go. But I love FOSS alternatives so keep it up!
- mistermann 10y ago
  No Chromecast support? Damn.
  - finnn 10y ago
    It's an open issue: https://github.com/dularion/streama/issues/4 https://github.com/dularion/streama/issues/4
abhianet 10y ago
It's like Netflix, but distributed! https://popcorntime.sh/en https://popcorntime.sh/en Snarkiness aside, this is beautiful!
- che_shirecat 10y ago
  Biggest library of shows/movies too - they must have such great relationships with the mega media corps ! !
  - geoka9 10y ago
    Either that or no relationships at all ;)
Insanity 10y ago
Looks interesting, but in the comments here I found out that it is similar to other software that already exists. I'm happy with my 90s like setup. Films and series in a folder, VLC to play them. I did give Netflix a try but did not like that it only has a browser player and on top of that annoying restrictions.
- stu2010 10y ago
  If you were using the Netflix browser player, you were missing out on high quality audio and video, which are only available from within the Windows 8 or 10 "app". If you were using the browser player on a non-Windows platform, you likely were stuck at the lowest quality 480p grainy video, as I am on the Ubuntu device I'm typing this on. For better or for worse, legal content distribution has been avoiding PCs as a target platform because of how easy it is to copy and redistribute anything that goes through a PC. If they keep it to more limited set-top boxes like Rokus or SmartTVs themselves, the management will feel like piracy is being prevented.
  - Insanity 10y ago
    The video quality was not that bad to be honest in the browser. (Ubuntu, Chrome) but I could not run it on Chromium without enabling other plugins which I did not want to do. I was running it on a low-end ubuntu device and the quality was at least 720p as far as I could tell. One of the main issues with it, at least for me, is that the content is restricted to content here in Belgium. My wife is Mexican and thus we sometimes want to watch Mexican movies or simply see things in Spanish or with Spanish subtitles. Things that are not available on the Belgian netflix.
  - fastball 10y ago
    What? I almost always get 1080p on my laptop when watching Netflix in a browser.
    - stu2010 10y ago
      So you're using IE or Edge? Netflix explicitly only supports 1080p or higher in Microsoft or Apple browsers, Chrome and Firefox get 720p at best. If you want 5.1 audio, no browser is an option and the Windows store app the only solution. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
amq 10y ago
People praise Plex, but I constantly find myself trying it and going back to Serviio.
- davedx 10y ago
  Yep we are still using Serviio. We have an old Win XP machine that we just turn on, go to the TV, pick up the remote, browse and select a film for the kids to watch from the Serviio file system. It Just Works
  - kaishiro 10y ago
    Interestingly enough, that's been my experience with Plex.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  The reasons I stay with plex: 1) Headless server setup. I run it on my server in a container and my media is available to it via a SMB share. Easy and simple setup. 2) Native apps for iOS, Android, Amazon Fire Stick. 3) Simple UI. I would move to something else if it had 1 and 2 above as well as support for multiple users[0]. [0] I am fully aware plex has support for multiple users. I just would prefer to not have everyone have a myplex account.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
captn3m0 10y ago
I'd tried setting this up recently for a light weight streaming solution, but found it lacking.
sandGorgon 10y ago
there is http://getvideostream.com http://getvideostream.com which does playback of local videos on chromecast through a chrome plugin. works brilliantly.
- alex_dev 10y ago
  I've been using this chrome app for many months and enjoy using it immensely. I do not need the bells and whistles of Plex. Furthermore, every time I attempted to stream a movie from Plex, chromecast had buffering issues.
- michaelmior 10y ago
  Awesome! Thanks for the pointer. I ended up hacking together a few scripts to do the same since I don't want to run a full-blown media centre, but this look much easier.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    the developers are really cool people. The support happens at /r/videostream Buy the premium version if you can.
planetjones 10y ago
I recently installed Plex on my Synology NAS. + awesome web GUI + awesome iOS app + excellent app for PS4 + streaming support for TVS e.g. Samsung via DLNA - synology does not seem to hibernate much now Plex is on (may not be Plex's fault) - needs premium pass to sync stuff to your mobile app (I paid for a lifetime subscription though, as it's a very good product) - Plex cannot use the hardware transcoder of my NAS, only the native Synology Apps can - Does not remember playback position of audio on mobile app (this is a big negative, as I listen to a lot of mixes which are a single audio file) Given a very good product already exists in the marketplace, which can stream to multiple channels, I am not sure what this project aims to achieve? I am all for people building new stuff, but I would like to see some gap analysis of existing products first so I know what the USP is.
- benologist 10y ago
  Synology's DS Video apps just got updated yesterday to be quite a bit better on Android TV and Android. Plex is pretty intrusive. Phones home constantly, for reasons that seem contrived considering all the media is on your hardware, the software is running on your hardware, and the 3rd party APIs they use for meta info can be used directly without routing through their website. Disaster waiting to happen when the MPAA gets involved. Or hackers, again.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    I like plex. It works, but would love an alternative so I could have separate users without having to have a plex pass. Not that I'm opposed to paying; I just want everything local to my machine.
    - prplhaz4 10y ago
      Emby has this capability and it seems pretty flexible...good for the "kids have their own library" use case... https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Users https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Users
  - calinet6 10y ago
franciscop 10y ago
This would be really useful 1-5 years back when HDD were big and cluncky; however nowadays I just sync everything on my 1TB Samsung T3, which is tiny and really resilient and I take that everywhere. So now for me the benefit of this would be marginal. I did use Popcorn Time for a while, and that has the benefit that it auto-downloads the shows and movies. Something that logically [1] Streama didn't seem to want to get their hands dirty with. [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn-time-and-it-never-will-be/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn...
- fastball 10y ago
  Also Popcorn Time is piracy...
  - franciscop 10y ago
    That'd depend on the country (;
    - fastball 10y ago
      Not really. Even if it's not illegal in your country, it's still piracy...
freelancesam 10y ago
What are the chances of this running on a raspberry pi?
ntrp 10y ago
Off topic, but I'm curious why a lot of people on HN, of all places, has such a negative attitude towards any new product, especially such small & open source ones... Well, at least nobody posted XKCD 927 yet.
- hukxchen 10y ago
  I think what comes across as a negative attitude might be mostly healthy skepticism. I think engineering-minded people all pretty much hate solving the same problem any more times than is absolutely necessary. New products are therefore always met with the questions of, "What does this add?", "Is it redundant?", "Why is the necessary?". If it can stand up to this scrutiny, then it deserves its place/seen as worth the effort.
bhouston 10y ago
We use Plex and while I used to love it, I get constant stalls when playing on Chromecast or Apple TV for months now. It requires me to disconnect and reconnect Plex. Tried different Plex versions, different network topologies in the house - but nothing seems to fix it. Netflix of course works perfectly. Wish I could figure this issue out.
- barrystaes 10y ago
  Chromecast 1? I had that too, try disabling encryption in Plex. In my case it wasnt the wifi signal quality, but rather all the decrypting the Chromecast had to do. And i found that using Ethernet also helps. I've seen Wifi AP's act up when using TKIP vs AES when streaming a video. Conclusion was it could not handle that load.
  - haikuginger 10y ago
    ^yep. The original Chromecast can't handle decrypting a high-bitrate stream realtime. It's kind of unfortunate.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Chromecast (first-gen) gave me lots of annoying issues, just not beefy enough IMO. We upgraded to a Roku 4 and the difference is night and day, much better performance everywhere, interface doesn't get hung and require an unplug, stream hiccups are very rare, things like YouTube can be smoothly controlled from phones whereas Chromecast would constantly choke.
gdulli 10y ago
What I want that Plex doesn't already to is to be able to define TV-like channels. I have 6 Resident Evil movies or 100 episodes of Futurama and I want them to play in a loop on their respective channels, and when I tune in whichever one happens to be "on" is what I watch, even though it's the middle of an episode/movie. DVR-like functionality where I could "rewind" back to the start of a 30-minute buffer would be good. Pandora-like skipping would be good. But those features wouldn't be essential, compared to creating the programming grid. I still want what Plex does and what Streama does, to navigate to a specific movie or episode and start it manually. Sometimes I watch media because I want to watch one specific thing. But often I just want my favorite media on in the background while I work or do other things. I don't want to navigate through a library of 200+ titles to pick just the right one or a pseudo-"random" one. Is there anything that would let me do this?
- _dax 10y ago
  I actually implemented exactly this a few days ago. It essentially procedurally generates channels from your library that you can flip through. Working on Chromecast support before I open source it
  - marcfowler 10y ago
    I'd be really, really interested in this, especially with Chromecast support. What are you writing it in? Perhaps I could help a little. Would appreciate if you could shoot me a message when you're ready!
  - sosuke 10y ago
    Do you have a mailing list I can get on for that?
  - thybag 10y ago
    As a plex plugin? Be very interested to have a play once you release, been hoping for something along those lines for a while :)
  - esteth 10y ago
    I'd love to hear when you open source this - it sounds perfect for me :D
tbirrell 10y ago
This looks really cool, but honestly, if I have everything on a hard drive, why would I upload it and re-stream it?
- fastball 10y ago
  So that you can watch your films on your tablet, laptop, whatever.
  - zerr 10y ago
    But you can do the same with file sharing.
  - tbirrell 10y ago
    Fair point, I can't plug the hard drive into my tablet.
ake1 10y ago
I've tried a lot of these and I really want to like them (plex/kodi) but the gui is way too hard to use, I feel like I'm in a straitjacket and always revert to the command line. Mount your content, be able to sort it through with ls/grep/find...queue up files...whatever. If I'm watching a series I'll just fire up ranger for one-button next functionality.
hising 10y ago
My guess is that this software would have been highly praised if some of the wonder boys of software had came up with it. All this negativity is one of the reason I really have a hard time enjoying reading the comments at HN.
- blauditore 10y ago
  What do you mean by "wonder boys of software"? Big companies?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I think people are just not seeing a huge value proposition over the current big players like Kodi and Plex. Of course, that doesn't mean the project shouldn't continue plugging away until it has one. :)
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Plex was the first thing I though of when looking at it, even though I haven't used it in years (haven't had a TV since 2012; just watch stuff on my desktop/laptop with mpv). Still, we should love open source projects and alternatives. I was hoping for more "this could grow to be a Plex alternative" vs "Why don't you just use Plex." I don't think it has to do with the submitter not being a "wonderboy" does it? Do people look at usernames (I'll admit I don't).

374 points by GutenYe 10y ago

Giorgi 10y ago

Either I am blind or this has nothing to do with Plex. Godspeed. Looks really nice.

chirau 10y ago
It actually doesn't have anything to do with Plex. They are not even that similar. Somehow the Plex conversation has dictated this thread.

amelius 10y ago

This is great. It would also be nice if you could share media files (over bittorrent perhaps) with a small group of people (e.g., family or friends).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mrmondo 10y ago

Nice to see an open source approach to this, disappointed to see it relies on MySQL though. Plex is a fantastic application for a similar purpose.

tn890 10y ago

How is this better than Plex?

touristtam 10y ago
I'd like to know as well. After moving from kodi (ex XBMC) to plex flawlessly, I am wondering what would be the advantage against plex for streaming.
Numberwang 10y ago
Is that really a fair question? This has fewer features sure, but should it really have to have equal to or more to even be worth looking at? This looks clean and simple to manage and would cover my needs perfectly.
- johnward 10y ago
  I don't think asking for a comparison to a current offering is a bad question. It doesn't mean both can't exist. Although this kind of reminds me of Xbox Media Center (XBMC) vs Xbox Media Player (XBMP). At this point I'm willing to give up control over my media for convenience though so maybe my opinion is invalid. I remember spending hours organizing my mp3 collection. Forget that. edit: Apparently XBMC is now Kodi so it actually is a direct competitor.
  - skykooler 10y ago
    I thought Kodi was a fork of XBMC?
    - SlashmanX 10y ago
      XBMC was renamed to Kodi.
thybag 10y ago
I had exactly the same thought when I popped over to have a look at their readme. It's odd they don't mention it at all, as at face value it appears both Plex and Streama are both solving the same problem. Would also have been interesting to hear what they view their edge as, as plex is already a pretty mature and powerful codebase, where as this appears to be very new. (I'd guess being open source would probably be their main edge right now)
- tn890 10y ago
  >I'd guess being open source would probably be their main edge right now Well, if you're looking for an open source alternative to Plex, there's Kodi already.
  - thirdsun 10y ago
    Kodi doesn't solve the problem of having your content available everywhere however.
    - TrisMcC 10y ago
      Emby does, and emby also has an excellent Kodi addon.
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      Kodi supports streaming, and Yatse provides very nice mobile streaming and offline caching.
koolba 10y ago
Is Plex FOSS?
- patrickk 10y ago
  Plex is based on Kodi (formerly XBMC) which is FOSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)
  - dublinben 10y ago
    But Plex itself is not.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      Indeed, Plex is not. Emby and Kodi are. IIRC the reason Kodi (back when it was called XBMC) switched to GPLv2 is because they got forked by Plex who didn't give back. I wasn't able to find a source on this though.
  - jannes 10y ago
    Only the Plex Home Theater was based on Kodi, but it has been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)#Plex_Home_Theater_.28discontinued.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)#Plex_Home_Thea... Plex apps are 100% closed source as far as I understand.
psheets 10y ago
I just switched from PLEX to Emby. Plex started to push Plex.TV down their users throats. Emby does not require any external authentication. https://emby.media/index.html https://emby.media/index.html
- arghwhat 10y ago
  How is plex.tv, their simple redirection service, pushed down your throat? You don't need to use any of that. I have both running, but unfortunately, the Emby server just burns resources like there was no tomorrow, and you can't really compare the UX at all, hence using Plex.
  - psheets 10y ago
    You have to use it for user authentication which Emby does locally.
    - arghwhat 10y ago
      That's optional. Plex has local account management. The iOS app hides it a bit, but it's there. You of course lose the plex.tv features (plex pass, etc.).
Nullabillity 10y ago
From what I can tell: Open source, and no cloud or premium upsells. Running on the JVM is nice too. Besides: https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass-pro/ https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass-pro/ looks both hilarious and sad.
TrisMcC 10y ago
Or Emby? https://emby.media/ https://emby.media/ It's open source and has most of the features that plex has.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Only the basic version is open source it seems: > "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Incidentally, the paid features seems to include most of the things that would make me consider a media centre installation, which would seem to make the open source version mostly uninteresting to me at least.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  Last time I tried Plex and Emby, neither supported gapless playback of music, which makes any listening of classical music excruciating / a non-starter. Is anyone aware of a self-hosted option that does support gapless playback?
  - ryanl-ee 10y ago
    I use Madsonic with the Dsub Android app.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Same, with iSub for iOS and streaming transcode from FLAC to 320Kbps MP3. I find gapless playback only breaks in cases where the content isn't precached and the network is so slow and/or badly affected by latency that the next track hasn't had a chance to start caching before the current one finishes.
Fnoord 10y ago
Competition is good. Aside of Plex, there'a also Emby, and Kodi. Each have their + and -. Here's a comparison between the 3 [1]. (Disclaimer: I use Emby.) [1] http://www.htpcbeginner.com/plex-vs-emby-comparison-with-kodi/ http://www.htpcbeginner.com/plex-vs-emby-comparison-with-kod...

Demcox 10y ago

So it's an alternative to Plex? Looks interesting.

the8472 10y ago

browser-based players are not really that great if your collection contains 10bit video, flac audio, ASS subtitles and other stuff that browsers can't handle without transcoding.

callahad 10y ago
The next release of Firefox (in two weeks) has native support for FLAC, and in the near future (by the end of March) I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will allow for efficient third party implementations of codecs. We'll get there...
- the8472 10y ago
  How does webassembly help with pushing 10bit or rec2020 content to the graphics buffer? or rendering at > 60fps? Browsers will always lag behind players which address the output devices more directly. Also webassembly may not be sufficient for some software-decoding on weak devices, it would need GPGPU-acceleration. But as far as I can tell WebCL is dead.
  - callahad 10y ago
    It's true that the Web can't do everything yet, but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts. For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago, using a codec hand-written in portable JavaScript. So it's entirely possible today, WASM just provides a sane path from existing C implementations to the Web.
    - the8472 10y ago
      > but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts My reference point is playback with madVR + xysubfilter. madVR uses various high-quality algorithms for scaling and post-processing that are generally too taxing for CPUs to do in realtime, especially at high resolutions or framerates. Similarly rendering complex subtitles containing vector graphics in realtime onto a high resolution target is also quite demanding. It works on an i7, but I would be skeptical about more anemic devices. So that's where gpu acceleration would help too. > For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago I have not heard about that one before. It seems to be an encoder geared towards realtime streaming. Codecs in realtime configuration generally make some tradeoffs to sacrifice quality and compression to meet their throughput targets. So it's hardly comparable to encoding for archival purposes (h.265 high profile has horrendous encoding times) or high quality playback. > It's true that the Web can't do everything yet But new features hit the market every few years. Native players can address them within months of the new interfaces hitting consumer hardware. Browsers and software running in them are hampered by their need for consensus, having to develop new abstraction layers on top of native features and slow rollout of new features.

Terretta 10y ago

Hello world video hub could be the new hello world blog! But one has only to review the (very frequent) release notes for Plex to see the devil is in the edge cases, not the basics. In the meantime, Plex has a native server app for almost everything, including NAS boxes, and native players shipping with TVs and in game console app stores. It does a good job on both playback and admin UI across a fleet of media hosts for a household of users, and the latest release unlocks hardware encoding across an array of operating systems. There's even a portable HDD + WiFI hub from Western Digital, to take Plex Server and 4TB of media on the go w/ 10 hrs battery life, in the size of a Sony Discman.

pjc50 10y ago
While we're on the subject of Plex, does anyone here use it for recording broadcast digital TV (preferably including HD)? I'm always confused about how most htpc systems only make sense for people with massive private ripped/downloaded libraries of media, while in the "golden age of TV" seemingly nobody watches actual TV.
croon 10y ago
Agreed. The only thing Plex does badly is subtitles, which both Kodi (of course) and simple players like BSPlayer does well.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  I wonder how much of that is because subtitles themselves are a mess, and it's highly dependent on the environment the player is running in. Some subtitle formats (notably DVD & Blu-Ray, if you're ripping your own content) are actually image formats with timecodes. There are other text-based subtitle formats. If a player (say, the Apple TV) supports one type but not the other, Plex has no other option but to "burn in" the subtitles on playback.
  - netsharc 10y ago
    I found it surprising that DVD subtitles are images, but then I realized it made sense back during the introduction of the DVD, with the crazy world of text encodings. Chances were high that the Elbonian-made player would get the encoding of a subtitle stream wrong and display Mojibake! With images they had a benefit of being able to do fancy things like use different fonts.

basdp 10y ago

So you just rebuild Plex?

phyushin 10y ago
I was just about to say the same

freshyill 10y ago

The beauty of Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Plex is that I can view my content just about anywhere and on any device. Free and I pen source is certainly preferable, but I want to watch movies on my Apple TV in my living room. That's the problem I need solved. I suspect it's similar for most people.

kochthesecond 10y ago
This is indeed my problem. And I will pay to solve it, eg. In the form of Plex or Netflix
shoggoth 10y ago
Plex has an ATV app
- freshyill 10y ago
  I know. This does not.
TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
Netflix/Prime/etc aren't even comparable to a local media library to me. Legal issues aside, a local library can be configured to download the latest episodes of programs I like automatically, and keep an eye out for movies I like the look of, which I can then watch offline at my leisure. Streaming services allows me to browse programs I haven't considered adding to my library, or maybe haven't even heard of, and watch them immediately without having to wait for them to download. They're different use cases for different purposes, and with a few exceptions for hard-to-find stuff that I mostly keep around for nostalgic purposes, streaming is winning. I can't store the programs I want to watch for the cost of a Netflix subscription (a quick calculation shows that it would cost £10 per month in disks alone to fill a 4-bay NAS with 8TB disks, without considering Usenet subscriptions and electricity costs)

djvdorp 10y ago

Good to have more alternatives for Plex and Emby, but without having native apps for almost all architectures in use, mobile apps and Chromecast support it has quite a long way to go. But I love FOSS alternatives so keep it up!

mistermann 10y ago
No Chromecast support? Damn.
- finnn 10y ago
  It's an open issue: https://github.com/dularion/streama/issues/4 https://github.com/dularion/streama/issues/4

abhianet 10y ago

It's like Netflix, but distributed! https://popcorntime.sh/en https://popcorntime.sh/en Snarkiness aside, this is beautiful!

che_shirecat 10y ago
Biggest library of shows/movies too - they must have such great relationships with the mega media corps ! !
- geoka9 10y ago
  Either that or no relationships at all ;)

Insanity 10y ago

Looks interesting, but in the comments here I found out that it is similar to other software that already exists. I'm happy with my 90s like setup. Films and series in a folder, VLC to play them. I did give Netflix a try but did not like that it only has a browser player and on top of that annoying restrictions.

stu2010 10y ago
If you were using the Netflix browser player, you were missing out on high quality audio and video, which are only available from within the Windows 8 or 10 "app". If you were using the browser player on a non-Windows platform, you likely were stuck at the lowest quality 480p grainy video, as I am on the Ubuntu device I'm typing this on. For better or for worse, legal content distribution has been avoiding PCs as a target platform because of how easy it is to copy and redistribute anything that goes through a PC. If they keep it to more limited set-top boxes like Rokus or SmartTVs themselves, the management will feel like piracy is being prevented.
- Insanity 10y ago
  The video quality was not that bad to be honest in the browser. (Ubuntu, Chrome) but I could not run it on Chromium without enabling other plugins which I did not want to do. I was running it on a low-end ubuntu device and the quality was at least 720p as far as I could tell. One of the main issues with it, at least for me, is that the content is restricted to content here in Belgium. My wife is Mexican and thus we sometimes want to watch Mexican movies or simply see things in Spanish or with Spanish subtitles. Things that are not available on the Belgian netflix.
- fastball 10y ago
  What? I almost always get 1080p on my laptop when watching Netflix in a browser.
  - stu2010 10y ago
    So you're using IE or Edge? Netflix explicitly only supports 1080p or higher in Microsoft or Apple browsers, Chrome and Firefox get 720p at best. If you want 5.1 audio, no browser is an option and the Windows store app the only solution. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

amq 10y ago

People praise Plex, but I constantly find myself trying it and going back to Serviio.

davedx 10y ago
Yep we are still using Serviio. We have an old Win XP machine that we just turn on, go to the TV, pick up the remote, browse and select a film for the kids to watch from the Serviio file system. It Just Works
- kaishiro 10y ago
  Interestingly enough, that's been my experience with Plex.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
The reasons I stay with plex: 1) Headless server setup. I run it on my server in a container and my media is available to it via a SMB share. Easy and simple setup. 2) Native apps for iOS, Android, Amazon Fire Stick. 3) Simple UI. I would move to something else if it had 1 and 2 above as well as support for multiple users[0]. [0] I am fully aware plex has support for multiple users. I just would prefer to not have everyone have a myplex account.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

captn3m0 10y ago

I'd tried setting this up recently for a light weight streaming solution, but found it lacking.

sandGorgon 10y ago

there is http://getvideostream.com http://getvideostream.com which does playback of local videos on chromecast through a chrome plugin. works brilliantly.

alex_dev 10y ago
I've been using this chrome app for many months and enjoy using it immensely. I do not need the bells and whistles of Plex. Furthermore, every time I attempted to stream a movie from Plex, chromecast had buffering issues.
michaelmior 10y ago
Awesome! Thanks for the pointer. I ended up hacking together a few scripts to do the same since I don't want to run a full-blown media centre, but this look much easier.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  the developers are really cool people. The support happens at /r/videostream Buy the premium version if you can.

planetjones 10y ago

I recently installed Plex on my Synology NAS. + awesome web GUI + awesome iOS app + excellent app for PS4 + streaming support for TVS e.g. Samsung via DLNA - synology does not seem to hibernate much now Plex is on (may not be Plex's fault) - needs premium pass to sync stuff to your mobile app (I paid for a lifetime subscription though, as it's a very good product) - Plex cannot use the hardware transcoder of my NAS, only the native Synology Apps can - Does not remember playback position of audio on mobile app (this is a big negative, as I listen to a lot of mixes which are a single audio file) Given a very good product already exists in the marketplace, which can stream to multiple channels, I am not sure what this project aims to achieve? I am all for people building new stuff, but I would like to see some gap analysis of existing products first so I know what the USP is.

benologist 10y ago
Synology's DS Video apps just got updated yesterday to be quite a bit better on Android TV and Android. Plex is pretty intrusive. Phones home constantly, for reasons that seem contrived considering all the media is on your hardware, the software is running on your hardware, and the 3rd party APIs they use for meta info can be used directly without routing through their website. Disaster waiting to happen when the MPAA gets involved. Or hackers, again.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I like plex. It works, but would love an alternative so I could have separate users without having to have a plex pass. Not that I'm opposed to paying; I just want everything local to my machine.
  - prplhaz4 10y ago
    Emby has this capability and it seems pretty flexible...good for the "kids have their own library" use case... https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Users https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Users
- calinet6 10y ago

franciscop 10y ago

This would be really useful 1-5 years back when HDD were big and cluncky; however nowadays I just sync everything on my 1TB Samsung T3, which is tiny and really resilient and I take that everywhere. So now for me the benefit of this would be marginal. I did use Popcorn Time for a while, and that has the benefit that it auto-downloads the shows and movies. Something that logically [1] Streama didn't seem to want to get their hands dirty with. [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn-time-and-it-never-will-be/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn...

fastball 10y ago
Also Popcorn Time is piracy...
- franciscop 10y ago
  That'd depend on the country (;
  - fastball 10y ago
    Not really. Even if it's not illegal in your country, it's still piracy...

freelancesam 10y ago

What are the chances of this running on a raspberry pi?

ntrp 10y ago

Off topic, but I'm curious why a lot of people on HN, of all places, has such a negative attitude towards any new product, especially such small & open source ones... Well, at least nobody posted XKCD 927 yet.

hukxchen 10y ago
I think what comes across as a negative attitude might be mostly healthy skepticism. I think engineering-minded people all pretty much hate solving the same problem any more times than is absolutely necessary. New products are therefore always met with the questions of, "What does this add?", "Is it redundant?", "Why is the necessary?". If it can stand up to this scrutiny, then it deserves its place/seen as worth the effort.

bhouston 10y ago

We use Plex and while I used to love it, I get constant stalls when playing on Chromecast or Apple TV for months now. It requires me to disconnect and reconnect Plex. Tried different Plex versions, different network topologies in the house - but nothing seems to fix it. Netflix of course works perfectly. Wish I could figure this issue out.

barrystaes 10y ago
Chromecast 1? I had that too, try disabling encryption in Plex. In my case it wasnt the wifi signal quality, but rather all the decrypting the Chromecast had to do. And i found that using Ethernet also helps. I've seen Wifi AP's act up when using TKIP vs AES when streaming a video. Conclusion was it could not handle that load.
- haikuginger 10y ago
  ^yep. The original Chromecast can't handle decrypting a high-bitrate stream realtime. It's kind of unfortunate.
cookiecaper 10y ago
Chromecast (first-gen) gave me lots of annoying issues, just not beefy enough IMO. We upgraded to a Roku 4 and the difference is night and day, much better performance everywhere, interface doesn't get hung and require an unplug, stream hiccups are very rare, things like YouTube can be smoothly controlled from phones whereas Chromecast would constantly choke.

gdulli 10y ago

What I want that Plex doesn't already to is to be able to define TV-like channels. I have 6 Resident Evil movies or 100 episodes of Futurama and I want them to play in a loop on their respective channels, and when I tune in whichever one happens to be "on" is what I watch, even though it's the middle of an episode/movie. DVR-like functionality where I could "rewind" back to the start of a 30-minute buffer would be good. Pandora-like skipping would be good. But those features wouldn't be essential, compared to creating the programming grid. I still want what Plex does and what Streama does, to navigate to a specific movie or episode and start it manually. Sometimes I watch media because I want to watch one specific thing. But often I just want my favorite media on in the background while I work or do other things. I don't want to navigate through a library of 200+ titles to pick just the right one or a pseudo-"random" one. Is there anything that would let me do this?

_dax 10y ago
I actually implemented exactly this a few days ago. It essentially procedurally generates channels from your library that you can flip through. Working on Chromecast support before I open source it
- marcfowler 10y ago
  I'd be really, really interested in this, especially with Chromecast support. What are you writing it in? Perhaps I could help a little. Would appreciate if you could shoot me a message when you're ready!
- sosuke 10y ago
  Do you have a mailing list I can get on for that?
- thybag 10y ago
  As a plex plugin? Be very interested to have a play once you release, been hoping for something along those lines for a while :)
- esteth 10y ago
  I'd love to hear when you open source this - it sounds perfect for me :D

tbirrell 10y ago

This looks really cool, but honestly, if I have everything on a hard drive, why would I upload it and re-stream it?

fastball 10y ago
So that you can watch your films on your tablet, laptop, whatever.
- zerr 10y ago
  But you can do the same with file sharing.
- tbirrell 10y ago
  Fair point, I can't plug the hard drive into my tablet.

ake1 10y ago

I've tried a lot of these and I really want to like them (plex/kodi) but the gui is way too hard to use, I feel like I'm in a straitjacket and always revert to the command line. Mount your content, be able to sort it through with ls/grep/find...queue up files...whatever. If I'm watching a series I'll just fire up ranger for one-button next functionality.

hising 10y ago

My guess is that this software would have been highly praised if some of the wonder boys of software had came up with it. All this negativity is one of the reason I really have a hard time enjoying reading the comments at HN.

blauditore 10y ago
What do you mean by "wonder boys of software"? Big companies?
cookiecaper 10y ago
I think people are just not seeing a huge value proposition over the current big players like Kodi and Plex. Of course, that doesn't mean the project shouldn't continue plugging away until it has one. :)
djsumdog 10y ago
Plex was the first thing I though of when looking at it, even though I haven't used it in years (haven't had a TV since 2012; just watch stuff on my desktop/laptop with mpv). Still, we should love open source projects and alternatives. I was hoping for more "this could grow to be a Plex alternative" vs "Why don't you just use Plex." I don't think it has to do with the submitter not being a "wonderboy" does it? Do people look at usernames (I'll admit I don't).