Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

People are doing exactly what you think they’re doing. They’re building collections of content illegally from torrenting.

With everyone creating their own subscription streaming service these days piracy is about to making a roaring come back and with the advances in software out there today it’s becoming easier than ever. You can go to reddit and find 100s of Plex servers that people open up to others for a small fee or even free. These servers contain nearly everything that’s popular. Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

View on HN

> Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

This, except for most people maintaining their own private libraries, it probably makes more sense to use Kodi to play back files in a file system, than to rename everything to fit Jellyfin/Plex's fairly inflexible file naming requirements.

There's software that can rename and sort your library for you though

I haven't figured out the balance between using renaming software (I've tried the free version of Filebot, but it has horrible latency for some reason.), and being able to remain a contributing member to certain media communities.

My solution to this has been symlinks. All the media files I download maintain their original names and structures so they can continue seeding, and I maintain a separate folder structure that complies with Jellyfin's naming conventions. All the files are just symlinked so they don't take up any additional space, and I have a couple small scripts to check for missing/broken links.

As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor. Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

> As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor.

Have you tried manually adding the content to the "Movies" and "TV Shows" libraries in Kodi? Kodi seems to have much more robust and flexible library support, though the process is less "set it and go" as well.

(A huge gripe of mine is having to store TV show seasons in a prescribed format in Jellyfin — I'm just testing it with movies for now.)

> Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

But yes, it's lacking on the other points, and for discovery of "similar" stuff.

If you have terabytes of media already, possibly. If your music matches iTunes naming standards it'll import easily. I've kept on top of media naming and it's pretty easy unless you're bringing in a ton of files.

TITLE (YEAR) is easy to edit, then clear metadata for the original file name so that isn't picked up. I use Rename My TV Series for shows.

I agree. Once you would go to a video shop and all the popular titles were in one location (annoying to be physically there, but central). Now you need to find out which streaming service is on, have the app, subscription (then remember to cancel if just one show interested in). It's a mess.

I did not know about these shared servers. Makes Plex/JellyFin etc interesting. All the popular media one spot ready to stream.

Note: although it is fine to add friends to your Plex server, it is against the ToS to sell access and users are shut down. Those few are probably setting the rest of us up for legal action at some point.

Absolutely, and I don’t participate in that. It’s going to ruin it for all of us and all I can say is I’m glad I’ve already been able to get several years out of my lifetime PlexPass.

I’m speculating that the rise of Jellyfin is/will be because of the coming crackdown on Plex and Emby. Github and other repository services will eventually begin shunning Jellyfin much the way Popcorntime was pushed to shadier corners of the web.

In the end this is all driven by the media companies refusing to deliver an easy and reasonably priced way to have access to most video content.

Your last sentence is dead on.

I also have Plex Lifetime but wonder if I'd have more of a voice if I was month to month vs no longer paying in.

I have Jellyfin running side by side with Plex, though the library is much less curated. I find it works for about 90% of what I want to do once I set up remote access and link in friends and family already connected to Plex. I don't have any player issues (all PC based) so the lack of apps for some products doesn't bother me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com