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I honestly can't keep track anymore. I've used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignorin

• 9935c101ab17a66 5y ago
  Goddamn that list escalated from “that makes sense” to “homers car from the Simpsons” quickly. I Plex can do most of the first few things you list without issue. - movie access - chrome cast - metadata - supports movies/tv (why would you want it to support random videos? Such a weird request) - automatic subtitles AFAIK these all work out of the box It also supports photo libraries but imo, it’ shouldn’t. Podcasts, again Are feature creep. Audiobooks can be setup and work wonderfully, it just takes a little bit of work and an app like “prologue” on iOs (a fucking amazing app imo) Your next point about supporting a cornucopia of obscure audio formats is insane imo. Eboo also make absolutely no sense. Emulator support? this can’t be serious. Ultimately, I don’t always agree with the new features that are prioritized, but Plex overall is an amazing app. They also have released really great quality of life features recently too, like skipping intros in tv shows is such a cool idea, and it works really well imo. Also, IPTV/ dvr support has been improving rapidly. Nothing is ever going to support your list of requirements, and even if something did, it would be such a bloated mess.
• a254613e 5y ago
  No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.
  • notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  • bane 5y ago
    Why?
    • amitport 5y ago
      Every feature seems simple by itself, but considering the overall scope and the maintenance effort, you will need dozends of people working full time on this. (I worked at such a very for profit media tech company)
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Because people want a massive piece of software for free and "expect it". I mean we would all love to have what you typed out there but it would be a massive effort and not likely to happen anytime soon. Jellyfin and Calibre do a lot of what you have there but probably not even the majority of it and certainly not flawlessly
    • patrickk 5y ago
      The scope gets bloated and the app unfocused. Most people wouldn’t read eBooks or comics from a big screen interface for example, but use a dedicated app for that. Keeping a cinema app primarily focused on video means it is leaner and meaner for the majority use case.
  • harrisi 5y ago
    Is this sarcasm? I don't mean any disrespect or negativity, I just don't understand. I'm not familiar with this space, but I don't see why the aforementioned expectations are unrealistic. The only issue I can imagine is big media companies strong arming a player in this space (which I assume is what happens to existing companies mentioned). There's nothing technically impossible mentioned.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  Putting it in a list makes it's pretty clear how much people are expecting from these "media theater" servers, yet it's kind of depressing to get backslash from wanting to "go commercial". I find it already pretty incredible we have so advanced solutions mostly open source. I mean, as commercial software I only used Apple's offering (FrontRow ?), it was financed by an already pretty strong company who had all the incentives to make it a compelling thing, and it only did a tenth perhaps of what is requested there. Doesn't feel like a surprise if Plex was trying to get more funding to keep the product dev ongoing for the next years.
• bb88 5y ago
  I was most disappointed when they got rid of the cloud sync and things. Servers should sync between each other easily, but they don't. And the plex channels are mostly worthless, the entire point of plex is for people to bring their own content. I'm also not a big fan of the youtube algorithm. It would be super nice just to have a "channel first"/"category first" way of viewing youtube instead of an "algorithm that knows better than you".
• Dedime 5y ago
  As far as Jellyfin goes in my own experience: - Supports phone / tablet / browser / roku / others - Can chromecast - Supports movies, tv. Not sure about random videos but I suppose you could do it. - Supports subtitle downloading - Haven't used it myself, but supports podcasts, books, photos, music Also FOSS. Doesn't have the same motive as commercial software ala Plex to nag you, and it hasn't nagged me yet.
  • kevincox 5y ago
    I use jellyfin myself but it is so incredibly slow that often it is basically non-functional. It seems that usually when I first open it after a while it is fast enough but then it rapidly slows to a crawl where it sometimes can't even start the next episode in a series. I'm not running it on fantastic hardware but it should me more than sufficient for this task, other services on the box are snappy. I would happily replace it if I could find an alternative. The developers also have no concept of security past the very basics. Make sure you run it in a network namrspace or something otherwise it will accidently bind to random network interfaces even though you told it to use the loopback address. The devs don't seem to think this is a problem. Falling back to a public interface is a feature that prevents support requests.
    • kuschku 5y ago
      If you put jellyfin's sqlite DB onto an NVMe drive, its speed instantly skyrockets and becomes very usable.
• dheera 5y ago
  Is there an open source thing that can act like a Chromecast but run on, say, a NUC and output to an arbitary gstreamer pipeline or some other foo?
  • ThatPlayer 5y ago
    I remember seeing a few open source projects like that, but the issue was Chromecast requires DRM for apps like Netflix. Some like Plex and YouTube would work fine. Maybe you could run it through a capture card and pipe that to whatever, but it's a lot more expensive.
• Seirdy 5y ago
  This sounds like an OS, not a program. Maybe try connecting your laptop to the TV as an external monitor.
• refracture 5y ago
  Auto subtitle downloads? Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already… unless you aren’t. Seriously though you are asking a lot here.
  • 9935c101ab17a66 5y ago
    I think Plex does this outta the box lol.
  • alophawen 5y ago
    That's been a plex feature since day 1 (?)
  • nyepepper 5y ago
    this already exists in jellyfin
  • blendergeek 5y ago
    > Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already… I can't figure out how to get subtitles for stuff I DVR off my OTA TV so this would be nice for me and I am not a pirate.
• smackeyacky 5y ago
  Just buy a google chromecast with google tv and install VLC on it. No games or mame but everything else on the list is covered. Kodi is fun but having to educate the non technical household members how to use it is not fun. Thats what killed the old HTPC concept for me. Too much fiddling, not enough watching.
  • benjaminwootton 5y ago
    How does this work? Where is the media hosted? Chromecast nearly cracks this problem, but playing local media has always needed weird fragile browser extensions in my experience.
    • lajamerr 5y ago
      The newer Chromecast(Chromecast with Google TV) has a redesigned Android TV interface with a smart remote. The older chromecast you didn't really have any interface to interact with it aside from sending a signal from your phone to control it remotely. In this case I believe the above commenter was just implying to use your home PC as your Media server, install VLC on the Chromecast with Google TV, and then play the media back on the Chromecast via the Network share.
      • smackeyacky 5y ago
        Yes, a raspberry pi with a usb drive running samba and minidlna. I started with an old nslu2, the pi on my network is slug5, as its the fifth machine that has done this job over about 15 years or so. VLC installed on the chromecast works well with the little remote control, so local media is no harder than netflix or prime. Edit: the original streamer I used was a Neuston mc-500, which could access network files. The nslu2 was a little slow, but 15 years ago media files were much smaller too. You could record digital tv with a usb dongle and play it back on the neuston which amazed me at the time. Edit2: the kids had hacked PS2s in their bedrooms that had media players on them that pulled data from the nslu2 as well. It was cool, cheap and worked well.
    • chrisjc 5y ago
• discardable_dan 5y ago
  Plex supports a lot of this as paid features.
• raffraffraff 5y ago
  Nope. So I found that the only way to get a media solution was to compromise. I thought I needed a media server / streamer. Not sure why. Maybe because I started with Plex years ago, and that's what it is. I dropped Plex because I don't trust them, and they force me to log into their service. I switched to Jellyfin because it's the most recommended alternative (and is a more 'free' fork of Emby). But I thought it was garbage. It had extremely slow media indexing, to the point where it was unusable. What made that worse was that there was no feedback in the UI telling me what files it was choking on, and its logs are abysmal. It's basically a black box, and it just gets stuck constantly. After about 2 weeks flogging a dead horse I gave up. Right now I run Kodi on a raspberry pi 4, which sits behind my TV. It's not a server or streamer, it's a media player. But you know what? That's fine. Because it just works. It's hooked up to a 4TB USB disk. It boots off an m2 SSD in a USB enclosure. I ditched the chromecast, and installed an Android app to control Kodi. Best part is that it's just a computer with all my media on it so I can just use a keyboard+mouse and navigate to files if I want. If I wanted a 2nd or 3rd TV, honestly I'd just duplicate the setup and use Syncthing to keep media in sync between them, giving the added benefit of data redundancy.
  • chrisjc 5y ago
    How does your Rpi connect to the TV, HDMI? How do you control the TV, through CEC? Wondering why you wouldn't consider adding a NAS/SMB into the mix if you were adding a 2nd or 3rd head to the mix instead of syncing across disks?
    • raffraffraff 5y ago
      I have a NAS, but it's old. Perfectly good as a backup though, so I keep the pi in sync with it. As for the pi, it's connected straight to the TV's HDMI. It has a 7.1 USB audio that connects it to an ancient Yamaha receiver. I have no other media sources, and the TV is one of those digital signage models that has no smart features or tuners. So there's nothing complicated to do really. The Pi puts the screen to sleep when there's nothing playing.
• KoftaBob 5y ago
  https://firecore.com/infuse https://firecore.com/infuse
  • chrisjc 5y ago
    Very nice! Never heard of this but gave it a go and it looks promising. I'm already using VLC and accessing content via local network, but this looks a lot more polished and always good to have a backup/alternative.
    • KoftaBob 5y ago
      My favorite feature is the ability to stream media from OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox etc. I just throw my movies/shows in my OneDrive and stream it from Infuse, saving the space on my laptop!
• apexalpha 5y ago
  Funny, from my perspective about 50% of the features you list I would consider "spending time developing things I don't want". I guess it depends on the perspective. For me, just wanting to stream movies from my NAS anywhere Plex works beautifully.
• thefz 5y ago
  > I've used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignoring things the community would like I've stopped using it at home because it keeps on wanting to transcode files for me even if I configured it not to and having gigabit ethernet. And it destroys my server's CPU doing so since I'm not that rich to have a spare video card around.
  • kuschku 5y ago
    That's because you put files in that are in formats no browser can play. Next time, try obtaining h264+AAC in mp4 container instead.
    • hansel_der 5y ago
      this! if you want your media to be playable basically everywhere, use h264/AVC. sure a hvec-file would be about half the size but who cares?
      • Trixter 5y ago
        Even HEVC works depending on the client support; for example, I stream h.265/HEVC to my 4K TV and it decodes it just fine. (Which makes me wonder what formats the OP has things stored in that plex has to transcode, or what client device they're using)
        • kuschku 5y ago
          Most anime releases are 10-bit h265/HEVC in Matroska container with ASS subtitles (which are a huge mess anyway and should stop being used), which isn’t supported anywhere at all.
• npigrounet 5y ago
  Yes, what are doing the devs? They should spend more time working for my own needs on their free time for their free software! /s
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• crispyambulance 5y ago
  I've found Plex to be decently capable for all the things I want EXCEPT ONE. For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end. What's the point of having elaborate media containers like MKV if you can't just point to an arbitrarily named file, process, fill-in, or read the metadata and have it added to your library? I mean, Plex maintains a database, can read metadata, pull info from moviedb, tag stuff, categorize... what's up with the obsession on filenames?
  • deadbunny 5y ago
    The reason for the file naming convention is for metadata matching. All they are really doing behind the scenes is searching the movie name (and possibly year) from a metadata provider. The files you obtain online or rip yourself themselves rarely have any metadata in the file so the only remaining option is to parse the filename/directory structure.
    • crispyambulance 5y ago
      Right, that's understandable, but many folks prefer to not rename files. I would like to be able to just point to a file and tell Plex what that file is so it "knows" (puts it in it's database). If it can read/write metadata on the file itself, that would be great too.
      • deadbunny 5y ago
        > but many folks prefer to not rename files. That's like arguing that they prefer an unsorted pile of thousands of books vs. a library/bookstore. I mean if that's how they want it then fine, but you don't get the useful features. There are a multitude of metadata managers out there which don't require the same directory structure but they are a load more effort than automatic metadata matching and a lot more effort than simply organizing your media in the first place.
  • wiether 5y ago
    > For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end. Idk, on Kodi I had to rename my files a certain way for them to be associated with metadata from IMDB & all, so I was used to having Filebot[1] doing the job for me. When I switched to Plex, I didn't even think about it, I kept renaming my files with Filebot. Also I prefer the light and clearer pattern that is resulting from Filebot instead of having weird filenames depending on the release. [1] : https://www.filebot.net/ https://www.filebot.net/
• nyepepper 5y ago
  My requirements towards one solution is almost the same as yours. I've tried for a (relative) long time with jellyfin since I don't like the half-assed selfhosted/commercial approach from plex. I think jellyfin works great for: * multi-user with setting limits and access * multiple devices * chromecasting everything * native apps (the one for firetv works perfect) * meta data scrapping * automatic subtitle downloading and managing * creating playlists and collections I tried using jellyfin also for: * music * audiobooks * ebooks but without any satisfactory success. I now use calibre-online for ebooks and am yet to find something good for audiobooks/music. I don't think you will ever find a PERFECT selfhosted completely opensource tool for everything and by now i think that's fine.