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Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

Having tried everything from Plex, Emby, and JellyFin to casting on various platforms and RaspPi with HDMI, I found the best experience for me was to get the VLC app on my AppleTV. It plays straight from my NAS over SMB, doesn’t need any transcoding, and let’s me download subtitles on screen directly.

I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.

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The one thing that keeps me locked into a pretty interface is remembering:

1. What has and has not been watched 2. How far through a film/episode has been watched 3. One click to start watching the film/series from where I left off

If the VLC app can do that then I'm sold.

What keeps me locked into these solutions is that I'm totally sold on the ChromeCast concept where your TV is just a dumb screen with barely any interaction (on/off, volume and pause/resume (but only if the stars align and HDMI CEC works)) and your phone/pc tells it which content it should play. Haven't been able to get DLNA working on my current TV.

This is why I use Plex. I tried using Roku and other things with a remote, but using my phone to just cast things is amazing. I also love Plex/Jellyfin because I like organization and metadata and playlists, etc.

I tried Jellyfin, but the UX wasn't there for me. But it's still very young, so hopefully it gets better.

For Chromecast and DLNA, on Android I found that the "Web Video Cast" app by InstantBits works the best [1]. It can automatically transcode videos for DLNA devices. On iOS I haven't found anything that works as good as that app yet.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instantbit...

I have been really satisfied with Infuse on the AppleTV. It does the same thing as VLC, but in a way more polished, Apple-like way.

I really like Kodi on Anroid TV. It has a nice interface and just plays from my NAS via SMB or NFS.

If you've pre-encoded videos correctly, they'll play in any player with zero seeking and zero loading times :)

-tune fastdecode and -movflags +faststart are the magic keywords

I use Plex with Infuse on my iOS devices and Apple TV and the Plex app for Android, this way all my devices know what I have and haven't watched.

There's no transcoding or buffering in Infuse (even with subtitles) but you'll sometimes need transcoding for subtitle rendering in the Android app.

Totally agree. I tried to use Plex on Nvidia shield but it was painful. Best was just use VLC directly.

For music I liked Kodi since it was able to get lyrics, but really haven't found a good use for Plex.

> let’s me download subtitles on screen directly.

How do you do that directly from vlc?

It uses OpenSubtitles.org I believe. Swipe down when the video is playing to access the audio/subtitle menu. Then in the subtitle menu there is a download option.

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