Plex also phones home, I thought. I could never understand why anyone uses it. What is wrong with mplayer running purely on a local client?

Local playback is fine, but greatly restricts your options for media boxes. The top end Apple TV 4K for example only has 64GB of storage, and the Nvidia Shield TV caps out at a paltry 16GB. The Apple TV would fit a few shows if you were willing to rotate them out, but wouldn’t be able to provide a “library” experience. The Shield supports external storage, but who wants an external HD or NAS taking up space on their TV stand?

So local playback implies something more like a mini-ITX PC or SBC running some flavor of Linux. That’s fine, but it’s not going to be terribly couch-friendly since it’s going to have a bog standard desktop UI.

So the most popular option is to put all your media on a server in the closet (usually an old laptop or raspi or something), with a client on your streaming box like Plex, Kodi, Infuse, etc connecting to your server.

> with a client on your streaming box like Plex, Kodi, Infuse, etc connecting to your server.

Never heard of Infuse but don't Plex and Kodi both contact the vendor's server? That is enough to make me not want to go anywhere near them. I do know there are home media center distros for the RPI and PC and they are supposedly nice. I'd be ok with using one in principle, but I haven't cared that much about media UI to bother. I just use command line mplayer on my laptop if I want to watch a video, and that's good enough for me. I can understand other people wanting a more TV-like experience, which is also fine.

Plex definitely connects to third party servers, primarily for verifying subscription status (some features are tied to a subscription) and to make connecting to your Plex box from outside of your local network easier (no IP addresses or something like dyndns).

Kodi I’m not sure about. It was originally XBMC (XBox Media Center) and is open source so even if there’s so phone home element, it can be built without that. Another open source option is Jellyfin, which is a fork of Emby from before that project was closed off.

Why does plex have subscriptions at all? I understand (at least theoretically) that not all software is free, but charging for it the normal way (you pay money and buy a copy that you then use without it phoning home) works perfectly well too. Anyway I had had the impression that Plex also sends at least the metadata of your video library to its home server.

I didn't realize Kodi was XBMC or that you could build it yourself. Thanks for that info.

Plex pulls the metadata for your library from public sources like thetvdb.com.

The server and clients use plex.com to authenticate users.

There are alternatives like Jelly Fin that should better alleviate your concerns.

Kodi doesn't phone home.

* Plex has clients for "smart" devices (Apple TV, Roku, smartphones, tablets), so you don't have to use a computer just to watch TV

* Plex tracks what you've watched so you don't have to remember what episode you left off on

* Plex serves up rich metadata when browsing your library

I use Jellyfin. It's great FOSS!

Plex isn't an alternative, its an app that plays content you host yourself, plus whatever sponsored crap Plex wants to shove into the UI. For people wanting to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime, this isn't a meaningful suggestion.

The Apple TV is a drop-in replacement for a Roku or Fire TV that lacks built-in advertising