3 ms·

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unl

by piaste 1mo ago

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding. So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.

cosmic_cheese 1mo ago
It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires. In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
- metek 1mo ago
  You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.
  - cosmic_cheese 1mo ago
    ffmpeg is a beast, not gonna argue that. As another commenter noted however, only a small fraction of those options are necessary to cover a media center project, especially if you're not beholden to supporting esoteric/archaic formats, aren’t bothered with trying to make broken/corrupted files play, etc. Being willing to specialize can also help reduce scope.
- wredcoll 1mo ago
  > the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling. What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.
intelkishan 1mo ago
What did the ebook space change into?
- piaste 1mo ago
  Until a year ago, it was either Calibre/CalibreWeb, Audiobookshelf, or a few alternative readers heavily focused on comics. Late last year, a vibe-coded app called BookLore appeared and basically brought over everything Calibre did but with much better UX and e-reader integration. The original dev crashed out[0], but the community picked up the project and started reigning in the worst of the slop and maintaining it as Grimmory [1]. It's pretty damn good. There is also a book fetcher called Shelfmark [2] that integrates with Calibre, ABS, or Grimmory. [0] and he _might_ be currently trying to push another even more vibe-coded competitor, but that's unconfirmed drama [1] https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory [2] https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark
hnlmorg 1mo ago
It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI. There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles. Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago. Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
- metek 1mo ago
  I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand. Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.
  - hnlmorg 1mo ago
    You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding. But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC. Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.
    - rpdillon 1mo ago
      Do you still maintain it?
      - 1mo ago
pitop64 1mo ago
[flagged]

by piaste 1mo ago

cosmic_cheese 1mo ago

It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires. In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.

metek 1mo ago
You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo ago
  ffmpeg is a beast, not gonna argue that. As another commenter noted however, only a small fraction of those options are necessary to cover a media center project, especially if you're not beholden to supporting esoteric/archaic formats, aren’t bothered with trying to make broken/corrupted files play, etc. Being willing to specialize can also help reduce scope.
wredcoll 1mo ago
> the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling. What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.

intelkishan 1mo ago

What did the ebook space change into?

piaste 1mo ago
Until a year ago, it was either Calibre/CalibreWeb, Audiobookshelf, or a few alternative readers heavily focused on comics. Late last year, a vibe-coded app called BookLore appeared and basically brought over everything Calibre did but with much better UX and e-reader integration. The original dev crashed out[0], but the community picked up the project and started reigning in the worst of the slop and maintaining it as Grimmory [1]. It's pretty damn good. There is also a book fetcher called Shelfmark [2] that integrates with Calibre, ABS, or Grimmory. [0] and he _might_ be currently trying to push another even more vibe-coded competitor, but that's unconfirmed drama [1] https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory [2] https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark

hnlmorg 1mo ago

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI. There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles. Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago. Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?

metek 1mo ago
I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand. Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.
- hnlmorg 1mo ago
  You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding. But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC. Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.
  - rpdillon 1mo ago
    Do you still maintain it?
    - 1mo ago

pitop64 1mo ago

[flagged]