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-kod...

Or Emby? https://emby.media/

It's open source and has most of the features that plex has.

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.

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?

I use Madsonic with the Dsub Android app.

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.

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

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.

You have to use it for user authentication which Emby does locally.

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.).

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.

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.

I thought Kodi was a fork of XBMC?

XBMC was renamed to Kodi.

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)

>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.

Kodi doesn't solve the problem of having your content available everywhere however.

Kodi supports streaming, and Yatse provides very nice mobile streaming and offline caching.

Emby does, and emby also has an excellent Kodi addon.

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.

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/ looks both hilarious and sad.

Is Plex FOSS?

Plex is based on Kodi (formerly XBMC) which is FOSS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)

Only the Plex Home Theater was based on Kodi, but it has been discontinued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)#Plex_Home_Thea...

Plex apps are 100% closed source as far as I understand.

But Plex itself is not.

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.