Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV

Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by throwaway287391 on Thursday August 22, 2019 @09:08PM (#20773793)

I've been using Plex for probably 5 years now and it's the best (only?) software I know of for its purpose, but I haven't seen it "getting better and better" as you say. From my perspective it's had more or less the same useful functionality since I started using it, and my biggest annoyances with it -- the overall flakiness of the apps, syncing, and Chromecast integration, as compared with Netflix -- haven't gotten any better.

But I'm still really glad it exists and don't really feel I have much right to complain about a free (for me) product.

(Edit: okay, to give credit where it's due, I just remembered they did actually fix my biggest annoyance with the iOS app -- previously when you deleted a downloaded video it didn't actually delete it from disk -- there was no way to recover the storage, other than deleting the app itself. So I'd have to reinstall the app every time I took a flight more or less. But they fixed that, you can actually delete things now.)

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by Terretta on Thursday August 22, 2019 @10:13PM (#20774052)

> only

https://emby.media/

https://jellyfin.media/

https://kodi.tv/

https://mrmc.tv/

https://firecore.com/infuse

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by tazard on Thursday August 22, 2019 @10:34PM (#20774119)

I have never heard of mrmc or infuse, but aren't they (along with Kodi) essentially just media _players_? And as much as I want to use jellyfin, it's not exactly ready on the platforms I want to use it for (although it's in the works). That leaves Emby, which doesn't have nearly the polish (although I just switched to it and an very happy with it). Not exactly a huge selection of choices...

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by gargravarr on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:57AM (#20778899)

Kodi is definitely more than a player, it's a full media library. If it doesn't do what you want out of the box (and it mostly does, categorising and metadata etc.), then plugins can handle the rest.

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by xnyan on Friday August 23, 2019 @02:08AM (#20774914)

I've tested and used all of these. Emby was a slightly different Plex with several weakneses and some strengths. It was free, now its fremium like Plex. None of the others have native applications for both android and iOS. Infuse is nice if you have an all iOS ecosystem.

update - Kodi has an iOS application if you have a jailbroken an iPhone with iOS 8.

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by mustntmumble on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:19AM (#20774484)

I've been using Plex for a good 3 or 4 years now, and have upgraded through a good half dozen or so version upgrades. What disappointed me the most is that their support for subtitles has gotten progressively worse over time. I did all the tricks to try and make subtitles work, whether embedded or not, but in the end I found it easier just to navigate to the folder on my NAS and open the .mkv in VLC, which recognises embedded subtitles no problem!

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Re:Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV by 0xfeba on Thursday August 22, 2019 @09:36PM (#20773918)

I used mediatomb ages ago, and now Kodi (formerly XBMC). Works great.

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