Streama – A self-hosted streaming application with your own media library | Hacker News Reader

Streama – A self-hosted streaming application with your own media library

github.com

374 pointsGutenYe158 comments

Hello world video hub could be the new hello world blog!

But one has only to review the (very frequent) release notes for Plex to see the devil is in the edge cases, not the basics.

In the meantime, Plex has a native server app for almost everything, including NAS boxes, and native players shipping with TVs and in game console app stores. It does a good job on both playback and admin UI across a fleet of media hosts for a household of users, and the latest release unlocks hardware encoding across an array of operating systems.

There's even a portable HDD + WiFI hub from Western Digital, to take Plex Server and 4TB of media on the go w/ 10 hrs battery life, in the size of a Sony Discman.

Agreed.

The only thing Plex does badly is subtitles, which both Kodi (of course) and simple players like BSPlayer does well.

I wonder how much of that is because subtitles themselves are a mess, and it's highly dependent on the environment the player is running in.

Some subtitle formats (notably DVD & Blu-Ray, if you're ripping your own content) are actually image formats with timecodes. There are other text-based subtitle formats. If a player (say, the Apple TV) supports one type but not the other, Plex has no other option but to "burn in" the subtitles on playback.

Nah... you can only select subtitle BEFORE starting a movie. This detail must be fixable regardless of messy subtitle formats. I chalk it down to Plex being US centric, subtitles don't seem as important in that market I think.

I think they are more important in the US than they are in europe, for example. Because foreign movies in the US are not being dubbed into english. In most european countries the movies are dubbed into the language where they are shown.

I think most people in the US and in Europe watch American movies.

I often use subtitles (often in ASS/SSA format) on content i'm streaming from Plex and have no issues changing the subtitle format mid-stream - if the subtitles are being burnt in because the player (e.g. Plex Web or mobile apps) can't natively render them then there's a few seconds delay before the video resumes. On players that can natively render them (e.g. Plex Media Player or Kodi with the PlexKodiConnect plugin), the changeover is instant.

From experience, that delay when you try to switch while it's using burn-in subtitles can increase quite a bit on slower servers, but as you said the switch does work (eventually).

For me while playing, there is only one subtitle to choose from. The one I chose before starting the movie. No matter how many subtitles the file actually has. I'm using the Apple TV Plex app.

Set the default language and set default subtitles to always use available subtitles and unless you're a niche case of always changing your dub/subtitle language you should be good to go for most, if not all, cases?

This was a problem with playing some of my anime collection with EN dub and no subtitles. Now it defaults to JP dub and any available subtitles (99% of the time is only EN Subtitles, sometimes there are JP/CN and I haven't seen what happens in that scenario yet)

This isn't the case on all Plex clients. I know on the Roku, you just have to hit the gear for stream settings and can change it mid-stream. I vaguely remember encountering something like this on the Android client and being really annoyed by it, but I don't use Plex on my phone very often so hasn't been a big deal for me. (and maybe there's a way around it?)

I found it surprising that DVD subtitles are images, but then I realized it made sense back during the introduction of the DVD, with the crazy world of text encodings. Chances were high that the Elbonian-made player would get the encoding of a subtitle stream wrong and display Mojibake!

With images they had a benefit of being able to do fancy things like use different fonts.

Plex is great EXCEPT they don't care about your data. They have refused to provide backup and restore capability for years. Been using Plex for a while and like it so much you want to buy a dedicated device to put Plex on? Say goodbye to your watched shows and movie history.

It's not the greatest solution as you have to manually run some commands but https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201154527-Move-Vie... has worked for me the multiple times I've moved Plex installs.

Uh, no? https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201539237-Backing-...

Plex does DB backups. You just tell it where to do it, and it'll do backups at some specified interval.

I haven't tried to restore, but I keep the backup in a separate location.

I find Serviio works well as well.

The bulk of the user data (your movies, paths, what you watched) seems to be stored in a com.plexapp.plugins.library.db SQLite file (that you find in Plug-in Support\Databases on the Plex Media Server data storage folder, on Windows it is %LocalAppData%\Plex Media Server and someone linked to a support question with the rest).

So I imagine you can get a pretty solid backup just by using SQLite tools on that one file (though backing up the entire Plex Media Server folder might also be nice to do every now and then to save other things such as plug-in data).

The DB, although obviously undocumented, is also an interesting place to poke around for looking at the data for your own purposes. For instance, it looks like the statistics_media table stores your watched show history.

Interesting. That never bothered me, and I've reinstalled Plex quite a few times over the past 2 years. For me it's quick to setup and re-index, so I don't really see an issue with its own data getting lost, as long as it leaves my files alone.

I guess it's because I don't use (or see the need, really) for these features. I mean, I can remember fine what I've already seen and I don't mind clicking through to my next episode when I get back into Plex, and I don't really care to know what I've watched in the past, how many times, or how I rated it.

I'm more bothered by its DLNA server crashing, its occasional screw-ups with multi-audio or multi-subtitle containers, or it's failure to transcode some files (though most of these might be due to the receiver more than Plex).

Yeah, there's also open source alternatives in this space too like Emby. I've had major issues with Plex (DLNA server crashing constantly) so I'm looking for an alternative. Currently just running a fork of PS3 Media Server called UMS which seems to work better, does transcoding and everything.

What you're looking for specifically is a DLNA server, then. That's not necessarily a part of a media server solution.

I suspect it's a bit of a dying tech - it never worked that well, support was limited, and better options are available. Back when I played with it, Kodi née XBMC and Plex were basically the only options, and the UI of the devices tested was awful, and not geared for large collections. Furthermore, it lacks the ability to expose server-specific services, such as transcoding and additional subtitles in case of Plex.

Using specialized clients forego much of these problems. I personally use a raspberry pi with RasPlex, but if I wanted to, my TV itself and my Chromecast can both also run Plex clients (although I shall never do the former - Smart TV platforms suck).

Yeah, basically, I do appreciate the media server thing for other uses though.

I've had quite good luck with it on my Smart TV until Plex started shitting the bed.

> Furthermore, it lacks the ability to expose server-specific services, such as transcoding and additional subtitles in case of Plex.

No it doesn't, UMS and others allow you to enable these things. In fact it has transcoding profiles for different devices just like Plex does and you can select the subs you want on your TV, mine lets me at least. Just really glad I didn't pay for Plex as I was considering it prior to this incident.

Can you, from the device, chose how to transcode and apply subtitles, select different video/audio tracks, potentially trigger ahead-of-time transcoding, etc.?

Fixed device profiles are not particularly useful. I may be mistaken, but I do not recall DLNA as supporting any such "extended", server-specific capabilities.

DNLA always felt fairly half-baked. VLC struggles to use it correctly, TVs stopped supporting it, and iOS/Android don't really use it out of the box.

XBMC/Kodi has a DNLA server built in, just need to turn the feature on. It requires keeping the app running in the background, though.

Interesting, might consider it - does this support transcoding?

For me, Plex falls flat in that it seemingly can't handle non-formal video files like home movies, in that it isn't able to search for words within file names, and it is very painful to view long filenames.

I posted on the support forums at least twice and was told (not sure if by maintainers or just other users) that I'm basically an idiot for wanting to do that.

So, I am very looking forward to something new in this space.

> can't handle non-formal video files like home movies,

FWIW I have videos on my Plex system ranging back for several years taken from at least 3 different cameras (highest end from only a Nikon V1 mirrorless though) and 5 phones/tablets.

I can't say I've played all of these back on all devices, but I have (or have had) a Nvidia Shield, Chromecast, Samsung ~2012 Smart TV, Roku2, Asrock Ion 330 running Plex Home Theater on Win8 and later Win10, as well as a couple phones/tablets and PC (via web UI) as an interface to Plex.

Really the only time I've ever had a playback issue is when my made-from-old-parts server has the CPU maxed out due to some other app going crazy, and then Plex playback will pause a couple times a minute. I really can't think of any time I've had content it just can't play.

I'm a big fan of Plex. I started using MythTV back in mid-2000s, switched to SageTV for a few years (due to the awesome HD300 devices), and very reluctantly (at first) switched to Plex ~3-4 years ago.

Oh, it will play them just fine, but good luck finding the video you're looking for when the keyword starts at the 50th character in the filename.

"Oh, that's such an edge case" - well, sure, but it is also completely not difficult to implement:

a) wildcard search on filenames

b) add a list mode that shows the complete filename, rather than having to sit and watch it scroll (say you've got 50 videos number #1 thru #50 and you want to play #39 - have fun with that)

I use to use Plex and really liked it. If I ever got a TV again, that's what I was going to use, but I had no idea it had a 50 character filename search limitation. That's so weird!

Oh no, there's no limit, it just can't search filenames (last time I checked anyways), and there's no practical way to view long filenames.

There's a thumbnail view, a detailed view, and a list view. Does the list view truncate the title? I only started using Plex a few days ago but I don't recall it cutting names short when I swapped to the List View for a moment.

I'll check again tonight when I get the opportunity - but I imagine a name would need to be quite long for List View to not be good enough (assuming it doesn't truncate).

Thank you gregmac for checking and reporting in with your findings. :)

I just checked on mine:

* Unless there is other metadata, the filename becomes the title, and the title is searchable.

* Text search appears to be fulltext-style:

  * A title like "2017-01-12 09-23-45.mpg" will be found with a search for "01-12". 

  * "20170112" is found when I search for "201701" but not if I search for "0112".

* The web UI list view is quite wide, but still appears to truncate after about 80 characters (even though that's less than half the screen width on my 1920px wide monitor).

Well that's fantastic news, glad to see they changed their mind.

Sadly, it still fails for me as many of my file names are quite long with the differentiating aspect being beyond the 80th character. The option to wrap filenames would fix that problem.

Yes, for something that is so full-featured and sophisticated, I found the media filename issues to be exasperating.

For those that aren't familiar with it, Plex REQUIRES a particular filename format. If you happen to have a media file that is named "wrongly" it either won't show up or it will try to randomly guess what it is so that it can display DVD-title image in your library. There appears to be no way to just force it to accept whatever filename you want. (This might have changed in the last year or so since I uninstalled Plex).

Most of the workflows that feed into Plex handle this pretty seamlessly. To be honest, I never even knew it had an issue, so I'm speaking out of a state of blissful ignorance of filenames—but that's how I want it to be, so can't complain.

Agreed that the rigidity around library matching is disappointing; I've found this is the case with most of these media scanners, and not just Plex specifically. XBMC allowed the user to add his/her own regexes to the matchers last time I tried it, but I don't think that Plex does.

I understand that there are potentially infinite permutations, but I think at least a slightly broader set of default regexes and/or a better way to fingerprint would be a lot nicer. Seems one could hash chunks of the file and compare against a database to identify media without considering the filename at all; that'd be the most convenient.

If Plex isn't matching what you want, mark the media type "Home Videos". That matches everything.

> If Plex isn't matching what you want, mark the media type "Home Videos". That matches everything.

Does it do wildcard search then? Last time I checked Plex wasn't capable of "select * from movies where filename like 'whatever', and from reading the forums this was very much not accidental, it seemed to be a matter of principle to them for some reason.

Even if that works, the inability to view long filenames is a deal breaker anyways for me (again, I have a feeling the answer to this would be "you're doing it wrong").

I know that there are extensions to accept XBMC/Kodi-style .nfo XML files for metadata. I would think it possible to use those to tell Plex to use whatever you explicitly set as the title.

I moved from Plex to Emby for exactly that annoyance. (Emby is better but not perfect on that issue...)

Thanks for introducing Emby, never heard of it. The retarded handling of filenames was exactly why I stopped using Plex!

TBH, I might have used something else entirely, but I had a Roku hooked to my TV which I've been completely happy with for the other channels it provides, and so Emby won out for me because it also has a Roku channel.

As a long time plex user, I'm tempted to try out Emby simply for one reason.- that is the GPU assisted transcoding. Plex still doesn't have hardware transcoder support.

Actually there are various ways to get proper matches without the exact filenaming convention they recommend. There's a feature where you can "Fix Incorrect Match" described here:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201018497-Fix-Inco...

This lets you pick the movie/show/whatever manually from a few different sources. If your media isn't immediately recognized, you can do this to correct it.

Additionally, they have a "Personal Media" metadata agent you can select for media that's your own personal media (like home videos) which will allow plex to read the metadata directly from the file instead of searching for a match. There's more info on that here:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200265246

I have never had the issue you described where something doesn't show up at all, just that it's incorrectly matched (in which case the tile will just show a screenshot and the title will just be the filename)

Additionally, I've found that if you use their recommended folder structure, the filenames matter much less. For example, if you have this directory:

/Media/TV Shows/Show Name/Season 1/

It seems like as long as the file contains the season/episode like "S01E01" it will match correctly based on the directory information. I haven't messed with it much but I have never had to rename a file to get plex to recognize it when I use directories like this

Thanks, this makes me want to give Plex another try.

It is really great, I have it running on two cheapo linux VMs as well as my gaming box back home. It's great to be able to watch on my phone, iPad, netbook, laptop, desktop etc and the Fix Incorrect Match feature works just fine.. I don't even create the Season XX folders, just /media/TV/ShowName/Filename.SxxExx.mkv{or whatever} and most multi-worded series dont match correctly by themselves, editing it once and putting spaces in works 95% of the time.

Plex doesn't manage your media, it just presents it and makes it accessible, if you want media managers look at Sonarr (https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr) and Radarr (https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr)

It looks like your posts are being autokilled (and mostly for good reason). I vouched for this one.

See also https://sickrage.github.io/

I haven't seen Sonarr before, it looks quite polished.

I can recommend it. I have a setup with Sonarr, SABnzbd and Kodi plus a sub to a nice European usenet server. Hardware is my desktop, a 4 TB NAS and a fireTV. All told a few hundred dollars and TV shows show up automatically for me, often within an hour of airing.

This is the first I have heard of Radarr though. (Sonarr but with Movie retrieval). I'll have to check it out.

You have to mark the right media type in Plex. "Movies" and "TV" will match against specific regexes, otherwise they won't show up. "Home Videos" will match everything. I host my home videos via Plex and it works fine. I also host a Downloads folder as media type "Home Videos" for miscellaneous videos because this is the only way to get it to match everything.

With XBMC, you used to be able to go back into the library settings and add/change the regexes yourself (was useful on shows like Avatar that would call seasons "books"). I wasn't able to figure out how to do this with Plex.

Recently Plex has become quite unstable for me. Constantly causing clients to disconnect, even when they're on the local network. All started happening after they added in th "brain" feature.

This is open source though, it's a great effort. I wouldn't write it off just because something else exists already.

While we're on the subject of Plex, does anyone here use it for recording broadcast digital TV (preferably including HD)?

I'm always confused about how most htpc systems only make sense for people with massive private ripped/downloaded libraries of media, while in the "golden age of TV" seemingly nobody watches actual TV.

What I want that Plex doesn't already to is to be able to define TV-like channels.

I have 6 Resident Evil movies or 100 episodes of Futurama and I want them to play in a loop on their respective channels, and when I tune in whichever one happens to be "on" is what I watch, even though it's the middle of an episode/movie. DVR-like functionality where I could "rewind" back to the start of a 30-minute buffer would be good. Pandora-like skipping would be good. But those features wouldn't be essential, compared to creating the programming grid.

I still want what Plex does and what Streama does, to navigate to a specific movie or episode and start it manually. Sometimes I watch media because I want to watch one specific thing. But often I just want my favorite media on in the background while I work or do other things. I don't want to navigate through a library of 200+ titles to pick just the right one or a pseudo-"random" one.

Is there anything that would let me do this?

I actually implemented exactly this a few days ago. It essentially procedurally generates channels from your library that you can flip through. Working on Chromecast support before I open source it

I'd be really, really interested in this, especially with Chromecast support. What are you writing it in? Perhaps I could help a little. Would appreciate if you could shoot me a message when you're ready!

Do you have a mailing list I can get on for that?

As a plex plugin? Be very interested to have a play once you release, been hoping for something along those lines for a while :)

I'd love to hear when you open source this - it sounds perfect for me :D

Pseudo TV, an add-on for Kodi, does exactly this.

http://pseudotvlive.com

I'm intrigued as to why you want this.

(I'm not knocking it - I'm genuinely curious.)

I have two use cases, one is that I want to watch a specific movie or I'm watching through a show like The Americans in a deliberate, serial way. Plex does everything I need in that area.

The other use case is, I want to work or browse the web for several hours, or work on a puzzle, or clean, or whatever, and have something on in the background. There's some media I'll only watch deliberately with full attention, (The Americans) and other media I can rewatch repeatedly in background mode. (Sitcoms, or certain types of movies.)

When I want background programming I'd like less friction. Traditional TV works best in this area, in the sense that I tune to a channel and the programming is already set up. I don't want to stop every 22 minutes and pick a new episode, or choose one movie out of dozens. I'd spend too much time trying to decide. Pretending my library is made up of channels lets me choose one to tune in to, and I'll be happy with what happens to come up on that channel. There's a freedom in offloading the decision. (As long as I also retain the freedom to choose what to watch when I have a specific preference.)

What I can't control with cable TV is the content, I can only hope there's a channel with programming I want to leave on for a while. Sometimes there isn't. But I've got a lot of media and would do the work to set up my own channels.

Plex has shuffle functionality. Go to Futurama, hit shuffle, and it'll play for days without touching it. Even if you want them to play in order, if you hit play on the show or season instead of a specific episode, they'll play automatically after each other. No stopping every 22 minutes.

I recently installed Plex on my Synology NAS.

+ awesome web GUI

+ awesome iOS app

+ excellent app for PS4

+ streaming support for TVS e.g. Samsung via DLNA

- synology does not seem to hibernate much now Plex is on (may not be Plex's fault)

- needs premium pass to sync stuff to your mobile app (I paid for a lifetime subscription though, as it's a very good product)

- Plex cannot use the hardware transcoder of my NAS, only the native Synology Apps can

- Does not remember playback position of audio on mobile app (this is a big negative, as I listen to a lot of mixes which are a single audio file)

Given a very good product already exists in the marketplace, which can stream to multiple channels, I am not sure what this project aims to achieve? I am all for people building new stuff, but I would like to see some gap analysis of existing products first so I know what the USP is.

Synology's DS Video apps just got updated yesterday to be quite a bit better on Android TV and Android.

Plex is pretty intrusive. Phones home constantly, for reasons that seem contrived considering all the media is on your hardware, the software is running on your hardware, and the 3rd party APIs they use for meta info can be used directly without routing through their website. Disaster waiting to happen when the MPAA gets involved. Or hackers, again.

I like plex. It works, but would love an alternative so I could have separate users without having to have a plex pass. Not that I'm opposed to paying; I just want everything local to my machine.

Emby has this capability and it seems pretty flexible...good for the "kids have their own library" use case...

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Users

Sadly, it's approximately you plus like 12 other people who care about the issue you describe. The experience works and works well, so very few people care how it works.

Eh, I also paid lifetime pass but that does not mean I am not happy there is an insurance plan in the form of an open source alternative

> Plex cannot use the hardware transcoder of my NAS, only the native Synology Apps can

Not super topical, but this is what made me move Plex back to my Desktop. It's working fine with a network mounted drive, but I did like having a "Plex box" of sorts.

It's like Netflix, but distributed! https://popcorntime.sh/en

Snarkiness aside, this is beautiful!

Biggest library of shows/movies too - they must have such great relationships with the mega media corps ! !

Either that or no relationships at all ;)

Good to have more alternatives for Plex and Emby, but without having native apps for almost all architectures in use, mobile apps and Chromecast support it has quite a long way to go. But I love FOSS alternatives so keep it up!

No Chromecast support? Damn.

It's an open issue: https://github.com/dularion/streama/issues/4

there is http://getvideostream.com which does playback of local videos on chromecast through a chrome plugin. works brilliantly.

Awesome! Thanks for the pointer. I ended up hacking together a few scripts to do the same since I don't want to run a full-blown media centre, but this look much easier.

the developers are really cool people. The support happens at /r/videostream

Buy the premium version if you can.

I've been using this chrome app for many months and enjoy using it immensely. I do not need the bells and whistles of Plex. Furthermore, every time I attempted to stream a movie from Plex, chromecast had buffering issues.

My guess is that this software would have been highly praised if some of the wonder boys of software had came up with it. All this negativity is one of the reason I really have a hard time enjoying reading the comments at HN.

What do you mean by "wonder boys of software"? Big companies?

I think people are just not seeing a huge value proposition over the current big players like Kodi and Plex. Of course, that doesn't mean the project shouldn't continue plugging away until it has one. :)

Plex was the first thing I though of when looking at it, even though I haven't used it in years (haven't had a TV since 2012; just watch stuff on my desktop/laptop with mpv).

Still, we should love open source projects and alternatives. I was hoping for more "this could grow to be a Plex alternative" vs "Why don't you just use Plex."

I don't think it has to do with the submitter not being a "wonderboy" does it? Do people look at usernames (I'll admit I don't).

browser-based players are not really that great if your collection contains 10bit video, flac audio, ASS subtitles and other stuff that browsers can't handle without transcoding.

The next release of Firefox (in two weeks) has native support for FLAC, and in the near future (by the end of March) I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will allow for efficient third party implementations of codecs. We'll get there...

How does webassembly help with pushing 10bit or rec2020 content to the graphics buffer? or rendering at > 60fps?

Browsers will always lag behind players which address the output devices more directly.

Also webassembly may not be sufficient for some software-decoding on weak devices, it would need GPGPU-acceleration. But as far as I can tell WebCL is dead.

It's true that the Web can't do everything yet, but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts. For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago, using a codec hand-written in portable JavaScript. So it's entirely possible today, WASM just provides a sane path from existing C implementations to the Web.

> but bringing in gpgpu is moving the goalposts

My reference point is playback with madVR + xysubfilter. madVR uses various high-quality algorithms for scaling and post-processing that are generally too taxing for CPUs to do in realtime, especially at high resolutions or framerates.

Similarly rendering complex subtitles containing vector graphics in realtime onto a high resolution target is also quite demanding. It works on an i7, but I would be skeptical about more anemic devices. So that's where gpu acceleration would help too.

> For media, ORBX.js was able to hit 1080p60 with 12bpp on smartphones three years ago

I have not heard about that one before. It seems to be an encoder geared towards realtime streaming. Codecs in realtime configuration generally make some tradeoffs to sacrifice quality and compression to meet their throughput targets. So it's hardly comparable to encoding for archival purposes (h.265 high profile has horrendous encoding times) or high quality playback.

> It's true that the Web can't do everything yet

But new features hit the market every few years. Native players can address them within months of the new interfaces hitting consumer hardware. Browsers and software running in them are hampered by their need for consensus, having to develop new abstraction layers on top of native features and slow rollout of new features.

Looks interesting, but in the comments here I found out that it is similar to other software that already exists.

I'm happy with my 90s like setup. Films and series in a folder, VLC to play them. I did give Netflix a try but did not like that it only has a browser player and on top of that annoying restrictions.

If you were using the Netflix browser player, you were missing out on high quality audio and video, which are only available from within the Windows 8 or 10 "app". If you were using the browser player on a non-Windows platform, you likely were stuck at the lowest quality 480p grainy video, as I am on the Ubuntu device I'm typing this on.

For better or for worse, legal content distribution has been avoiding PCs as a target platform because of how easy it is to copy and redistribute anything that goes through a PC. If they keep it to more limited set-top boxes like Rokus or SmartTVs themselves, the management will feel like piracy is being prevented.

The video quality was not that bad to be honest in the browser. (Ubuntu, Chrome) but I could not run it on Chromium without enabling other plugins which I did not want to do.

I was running it on a low-end ubuntu device and the quality was at least 720p as far as I could tell.

One of the main issues with it, at least for me, is that the content is restricted to content here in Belgium. My wife is Mexican and thus we sometimes want to watch Mexican movies or simply see things in Spanish or with Spanish subtitles. Things that are not available on the Belgian netflix.

What? I almost always get 1080p on my laptop when watching Netflix in a browser.

So you're using IE or Edge? Netflix explicitly only supports 1080p or higher in Microsoft or Apple browsers, Chrome and Firefox get 720p at best.

If you want 5.1 audio, no browser is an option and the Windows store app the only solution.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

So my guess for 720p was quite a good one then! That's quite annoying though for people who actually care about watching netflix in high quality. Can't imagine why this is done.

Neither IE nor Edge. Usually watch Netflix in Safari.

720p on Chrome and Firefox is also better than your initial claim of "you're probably only getting 480p".

Yeah, this is fine for playing back local media on a computer or a computer attached to a television. These new-fangled setups are for people who want to stream out to their phones, TVs, tablets, laptops, etc...

I use both. On my laptop, about 50% of the time I use the shell and mplayer to play a movie, the other 50% I use the Plex web player.

But Plex is really cool for streaming to the phone, watching on TV, watching when you don't have your own laptop, giving access to friends and so on.

I wouldn't want to give up either.

The beauty of Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Plex is that I can view my content just about anywhere and on any device.

Free and I pen source is certainly preferable, but I want to watch movies on my Apple TV in my living room. That's the problem I need solved. I suspect it's similar for most people.

This is indeed my problem. And I will pay to solve it, eg. In the form of Plex or Netflix

Plex has an ATV app

I know. This does not.

Netflix/Prime/etc aren't even comparable to a local media library to me. Legal issues aside, a local library can be configured to download the latest episodes of programs I like automatically, and keep an eye out for movies I like the look of, which I can then watch offline at my leisure. Streaming services allows me to browse programs I haven't considered adding to my library, or maybe haven't even heard of, and watch them immediately without having to wait for them to download. They're different use cases for different purposes, and with a few exceptions for hard-to-find stuff that I mostly keep around for nostalgic purposes, streaming is winning. I can't store the programs I want to watch for the cost of a Netflix subscription (a quick calculation shows that it would cost £10 per month in disks alone to fill a 4-bay NAS with 8TB disks, without considering Usenet subscriptions and electricity costs)

People praise Plex, but I constantly find myself trying it and going back to Serviio.

Yep we are still using Serviio. We have an old Win XP machine that we just turn on, go to the TV, pick up the remote, browse and select a film for the kids to watch from the Serviio file system.

It Just Works

Interestingly enough, that's been my experience with Plex.

The reasons I stay with plex:

1) Headless server setup. I run it on my server in a container and my media is available to it via a SMB share. Easy and simple setup.

2) Native apps for iOS, Android, Amazon Fire Stick.

3) Simple UI.

I would move to something else if it had 1 and 2 above as well as support for multiple users[0].

[0] I am fully aware plex has support for multiple users. I just would prefer to not have everyone have a myplex account.

This looks really cool, but honestly, if I have everything on a hard drive, why would I upload it and re-stream it?

So that you can watch your films on your tablet, laptop, whatever.

But you can do the same with file sharing.

Fair point, I can't plug the hard drive into my tablet.

How is this better than Plex?

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.

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.

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

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

Is Plex FOSS?

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

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

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

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...

We use Plex and while I used to love it, I get constant stalls when playing on Chromecast or Apple TV for months now. It requires me to disconnect and reconnect Plex.

Tried different Plex versions, different network topologies in the house - but nothing seems to fix it. Netflix of course works perfectly.

Wish I could figure this issue out.

Chromecast 1? I had that too, try disabling encryption in Plex. In my case it wasnt the wifi signal quality, but rather all the decrypting the Chromecast had to do. And i found that using Ethernet also helps.

I've seen Wifi AP's act up when using TKIP vs AES when streaming a video. Conclusion was it could not handle that load.

^yep. The original Chromecast can't handle decrypting a high-bitrate stream realtime. It's kind of unfortunate.

Chromecast (first-gen) gave me lots of annoying issues, just not beefy enough IMO. We upgraded to a Roku 4 and the difference is night and day, much better performance everywhere, interface doesn't get hung and require an unplug, stream hiccups are very rare, things like YouTube can be smoothly controlled from phones whereas Chromecast would constantly choke.

This would be really useful 1-5 years back when HDD were big and cluncky; however nowadays I just sync everything on my 1TB Samsung T3, which is tiny and really resilient and I take that everywhere. So now for me the benefit of this would be marginal.

I did use Popcorn Time for a while, and that has the benefit that it auto-downloads the shows and movies. Something that logically [1] Streama didn't seem to want to get their hands dirty with.

[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn...

Also Popcorn Time is piracy...

That'd depend on the country (;

Not really. Even if it's not illegal in your country, it's still piracy...

I've tried a lot of these and I really want to like them (plex/kodi) but the gui is way too hard to use, I feel like I'm in a straitjacket and always revert to the command line. Mount your content, be able to sort it through with ls/grep/find...queue up files...whatever. If I'm watching a series I'll just fire up ranger for one-button next functionality.

Off topic, but I'm curious why a lot of people on HN, of all places, has such a negative attitude towards any new product, especially such small & open source ones...

Well, at least nobody posted XKCD 927 yet.

I think what comes across as a negative attitude might be mostly healthy skepticism. I think engineering-minded people all pretty much hate solving the same problem any more times than is absolutely necessary. New products are therefore always met with the questions of, "What does this add?", "Is it redundant?", "Why is the necessary?". If it can stand up to this scrutiny, then it deserves its place/seen as worth the effort.

Either I am blind or this has nothing to do with Plex.

Godspeed. Looks really nice.

It actually doesn't have anything to do with Plex. They are not even that similar. Somehow the Plex conversation has dictated this thread.

Nice to see an open source approach to this, disappointed to see it relies on MySQL though. Plex is a fantastic application for a similar purpose.

This is great.

It would also be nice if you could share media files (over bittorrent perhaps) with a small group of people (e.g., family or friends).

I'd tried setting this up recently for a light weight streaming solution, but found it lacking.

So it's an alternative to Plex? Looks interesting.

So you just rebuild Plex?

I was just about to say the same

Reply on news.ycombinator.com