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.
Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.
Again, I was just curious if there was any reasons I couldn't think of why the top-level's comments were unfulfillable! I'm always curious about people's desires that (apparently) can't (or won't) be solved with software. This is a space I'm not too familiar with, but there doesn't seem to be any technical reasons why someone should have desires that get pushed against.
Certainly there may be practical reasons, I just wanted to try to pinpoint it a little bit. As an example - although I don't personally see much value in it - the audiobook thing seems like a relatively simple addition that I could see value in. I use Spotify for music, news, podcasts, and audiobooks (the last one is a lie, but I did discover there are audiobooks on Spotify to help my point). I could see the value in having these all on my tv - I just don't have one. But if I were in a situation where the tv was the typical media center, why not have it play audiobooks? It's actually a rather ideal platform for common audiobook consumption. As a recent comment somewhere here mentioned, people (presumably) tend to listen to audiobooks somewhat in the background. It seems handy to have a giant screen that could visibly show the current and recent text in an easy way. I find myself sometimes watching or listening to something where I have a momentary lapse in comprehension and I have to scrobble (do people use that term? Scroll? Seek?) a few seconds back to get the "umph" of a scene, sentence, or general point. If I were someone that listened to audiobooks while cleaning around the house or something, it seems handy to quickly read the missing few words to get the point rather than looking for my phone, unlocking it, looking for whatever app is playing the audiobook, getting distracted by other open apps, getting back to the audiobook app, and rewinding well past the point I missed because scrobbling across a 2 inch wide screen for a 10 hour book by a minute is impossible.
Weird rant. I have no horse in this. Just unemployed and this happened to mentally stimulate me I guess.
But I guess I could always just try mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.[0] :)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Edit: I'm leaving the usage as-is, but I seem to have used "scrobble" incorrectly. I think "seek" is probably the correct term. For some reason just yesterday I was thinking about "scrobbling" and I misremembered its functionality. Oops!
Why merge Spotify with Netflix? Just have two apps and services, is not that difficult for the user, nor a real nuissance. The OP didn't request audiobooks. He specifically asked also for PDF, a comic format (CBR) and "etc.". That, I guarantee you, lead to further requests (highlite the PDFs, a unified comic/pdf/movie/music storage and showroom, screencap, sharing...). Add a lot of underlying complexity, bugs, cost in manteinance, extra mental load...
As for the "ideal audiobook reader platform" let me tell you something: audiobooks are consumed by people while walking, running, driving, at the gym, in the sub... I've never heard of anyone planted in front of the reader just hearing the audiobook. The nature of audiobooks is "hear a book while doing something else", and a TV goes against exactly that. A TV audiobook is called "a movie" or "a serie", something that you can already watch in Kodi.
This reminds me of the "4 star but..." in the App Stores. Lots and lots of users of a nice free app comment like "I LOVE the app, but I only rate it with 4 stars unless you add this little, small, really tiny thing that I want. If you do that, I will come back and give you the 5th star".
I don't know the use case where being able to read eBooks from the television is desirable. It certainly doesn't meet my definition of shared entertainment, which is something that media centers are intended for. They're media, yes, and they can be organized, sure--but is there a common use case for reading from the large screen? Unless one is disabled, I really don't see one.
However if looking for a better merge of Kodi and gameplaying I cannot recommend Batocera enough. It has a large retrocomputing (emulation) capability and also supports many DOS games and Windows games via dosbox or wine and has recently added Steam integration. On the media side of things it can be configured to automatically load kodi and seamlessly transition from Kodi to the Emulation Station frontend.
There will be some configuration but once configured it has in my experience generally stayed configured well and can be a set and forget type of appliance if you take the time to organize your games and media and then leave it alone after scraping. Also it's been one of the easiest configurations I've done in a long time. I encourage everyone to look into it.
I think the Emby's, Kodi's, and Plex's of the world should focus on the "home Theater" space, making the best experience for the consumption of Movies and TV Shows. maybe music if they want to stretch
There should be separate apps for ebooks, podcasts, etc. I do not (and I am sure very few do) consume ebooks, and podcasts on my Large TV. That is where the "home theater" apps should focus, the TV Watching experience.
I understand sometimes people use a computer monitor, or even a mobile app to view it but I would image that is an edge case, and should not be the focus, when I want to watch a movie I am doing it on my 60in screen not my 5.5in
Plex is very good when it comes to “just works” for media consumption. That “just works” experience (API enrichment, artwork sourcing, device verification etc.) isn’t easy to maintain.
If your goal is organization, there are plenty of other tool specific to the individual purposes. If your goal is consumption kodi can server as a launcher to other applications. Adding the functionality is techincally possible but would require addons.
It's interesting that the parent expects this to all be a single piece of software. Is this a generational thing? It's the opposite of the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy I grew up on.
I like Jellyfin a lot but I actually sometimes feel like it tries to do too much.
I guess it depends on the perspective. For me, just wanting to stream movies from my NAS anywhere Plex works beautifully.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Seriously though you are asking a lot here.
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.
- 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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?
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?
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/
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.
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.
Your solution works for MKV files. The Plex solution works for all file types and containers.
It's easy to see why Plex would prefer this way.
It has an edit button in the UI for entering in the metadata to its database manually.
It has the option to prefer metadata already stored locally inside the container when populating its database.
It has the "match" button for interactively discovering and retrieving the metadata from an agent like IMDb or tvdb regardless of filename.
By default it tries to spare you having to do any of these things, but they put a lot of work into facilitating several alternatives when you'd rather do the work yourself.
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".
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.
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.
Chromecast nearly cracks this problem, but playing local media has always needed weird fragile browser extensions in my experience.
Chromecast is now either the action you take to "beam" from your handheld device to a TV or an AndroidTV/GoogleTV/Chromecast hybrid device.
Just went to the google store to find a link for you and had some trouble finding what I'm talking about and apparently chromecast devices are now considered part of the Nest family complicating things even more.
https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...
Edit: I stand somewhat corrected... there still is a chromecast device that comes without AndroidTV. I guess this just further illustrates my point about how bad/confusing google's naming and branding strategy is.
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.
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.
Maybe you could run it through a capture card and pipe that to whatever, but it's a lot more expensive.
I want a media center that can do these things:
- access from phone or tablet: remote is nice to have, but on my own network is a must
- can chromecast everything
- can scrape metadata reliably (I don't mind fixing a few things here and there)
- supports movies, tv shows, random videos
- automatic subtitle downloading
- supports music formats, podcasts, and audio books and understands they are different things, and can grab them as needed
- supports not only mp3s, oggs, etc. for music, but supports stuff their underlying media libraries already support like amiga mod, chiptune formats etc. (a major gripe of mine with plex). right now I need to convert to mp3 for this need, but the media libraries plex uses already supports these formats, it's just the damn gui and library indexing bits don't
- support for photo libraries
- ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc. (I need extra apps for this)
- emulator support would be a super sweet stretch goal
- has smart tv apps would be also great, but chromecast support is fine
Does Kodi, emby, jellyfin, whatever support all this?