From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

I’ve stopped using Plex-like stuff. I don’t really need it because transcoding isn’t as relevant as it was before. Pretty much every device I own can play h265 without CPU overhead.

What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.

Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.

I just use Jellyfin with transcoding disabled. It’s still nice having a web client and being able to watch anywhere. Plus it doesn’t cost me a dollar a month which is nice.

> I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU

I have a home server with i3 8100 desktop, I wanget to get Intel Quicksync transcoding to work

The amount of trial and error that took - linux situation is trully dire

So you're using four or five different things to replicate the functionality of one thing? This is sounding a lot like a certain Dropbox-related comment.

Not at all. There is a samba server and there is a media player in each device. I don't need to run .net or whatever code with a web server and a wrapper around ffmpeg. So it's totally the opposite of what you said.

I think the way I described how those devices get in sync gave you that opinion but to me as an user is basically just 2 things.

> The amount of trial and error that took - linux situation is trully dire

out of interest, did you try it on another OS and did it work OOTB there?

One major upside to plex is the ease of watching content over the internet though. There isn't a an easy way for me to give my friends access to samba over the net and then also 4k blu ray rips are a lot to stream over the internet

Fwiw if your Linux install has the right drivers for the igpu it does just work (at least on debian)

Have a 10th? (Frost) gen nuc and debian buster was a pain while bullseye just worked.

Samba, infuse, kodi, trackt, hide-my-mail. This sounds like five different things I have to set up plus a paid monthly subscription.

Yeah, I haven't needed transcoding since I was watching stuff streamed from my PC to my PS2. The entire existence of Plex, I've been confused about why so many people thought they needed transcoding, because even low end devices can play most media just fine without it for many years now.

But Jellyfin web client can't play a lot of common media file formats, because the browsers cannot play them.

...and how secure is this?

Maybe I can help with your confusion: zero percent of the reason I use Plex is for transcoding. It's a wonderful library-management tool with sharing for remote users and clients for every platform.

I use Jellyfin and my primary device for watching content is a Roku TV. It has to transcode quite a few different formats. Roku TCL TV apparently has issues playing certain MKV and AVI files. Regardless of transcoding settings in jellyfin, the Roku _refuses_ to play any MKV with S_TEXT/UTF8 subtitles. Errors out on playback. Using ffmpeg to JUST remove the subtitles via `-vcodec copy -acodec copy -sn`, the resulting copied codecs file plays just fine on the Roku.

Pretty annoying though.

Adding Jellyfin to the mix was the best thing I’ve done for my Kodi setup. I agree re transcoding - overused these days - I keep all that disabled

Jellyfin-Kodi gives fast and automatic library updates - no waiting 5 minutes for ‘update library’ on large collections - new content appears automatically. Also some nice QoL improvements like synced progress, slightly better metadata fetching, automatic subtitle fetching

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi