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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone migrated from Plex to Kodi who can weigh in on whether it was worth it? I have a solid little raspberry PI based home media streaming & download setup, with Plex as the central media app, but I’ve been curious about if kodi is wholesale better in some regards.

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I couldn't figure out how to bypass logging into Plex with the latest version, so I dumped it and moved to Jellyfin which is fully open source. It does all I need, including having both Roku and Android apps, and supports DLNA so I can stream to various devices around the house. Don't miss Plex at all.

Unfortunately there's no support for Samsung tizen TVs which is keeping me on plex

Samsung TVs are so horrible with spyware that it is best to keep them off the network and use an attached device like a Shield or Roku. This is also true with most other "smart TVs"

I understand the spyware part but one thing i noticed is that i dont get any ads which a lot of people I saw complaining about online. I think ads are location based and i'm outside their zone.

Do you have a pihole on your network?

no but from what I read Samsung uses their own hardcoded DNS on their TVs to bypass DNS filtering

Been using Kodi since 2017. it‘s running on an nvidia shield with the files being supplied via NFS from a Synology nas. Currently not using an actual media server like emby.

It‘s been mostly rock solid. Kodi is more flexible in terms of interface. If you don‘t like plex‘s ui - tough luck.

I‘ve actually started using Plex for my highest-end Dolby Vision MKV‘s because Kodi didn‘t support playback yet. Might be different now.

Other than that I don‘t see massive differences tbh. Plex is certainly more of a „set it an forget it“ solution. Kodi is certainly a very good option, but if you have more than 1 user you might need some media server setup in addition (emby server, er even server side plex).

Edit: just updated on my shield. Does anyone know if Dolby Vision is supported now? Quickly tested it with a compatible movie - didn‘t work.

Edit 2: just looked it up. Apparently dual layer mkv is not supported yet. Guess I‘ll keep using Plex for this use case for now.

We use Emby Server to maintain watch status sync and various not-Kodi-friendly devices in our house. The TVs use Emby through Kodi because of Kodi's superior interface and processing.

Kodi 19/Matrix broke that, however, so now we're just streaming directly from the NAS until it's resolved on Emby's end.

While the 2 experiences are nearly identical, we like the per-user/other device stuff that Emby brings in. (As well as outside-the-home streaming when we travel.) If you don't need or care about that stuff, just pulling from a central data store works very nicely in stand-alone Kodi.

The Emby and Plex apps are trash compared to Kodi if you care about flexibility/customization.

I have a computer on my network that runs an nfs server and hosts media, then use kodi on nvidia shields (or other computers) to access it. It works extremely well... as in not even a single issue for years now. I should stress that this is at the level of just serving files, as I don't show any metadata associated with the media (as it's mainly personal home movies, etc).

How do you authenticate to the nfs server? Did you setup kerberos ?

I have always been reluctant to go that path, it felt to complex for my home use case. I generally use ftp instead for this reason, but I guess it's not as efficient.

I share my media on an Ubuntu server via NFS - all I've done is set the shared media library as read-only for the devices it's shared with, and specify the (local, reserved) IP it should be sent to. The only authentication is the fact that it's LAN-only, and being sent to the right (local) IP

Kerberos would be far too complex to be warranted here - all that's needed is nfs-kernel-server and /etc/exports on the server side.

Granted, my network is reasonably locked-down (MAC address filtering, (reserved) IP addresses available matching the number of devices on the network), but security beyond that has never really crossed my mind.

I don't password protect the media files on the nfs server - they are visible password-free from any machine on my local network. Of course if someone has sensitive material and/or the local network is shared, say, then some extra setup is needed.

EDIT: another common use-case for me is basically grabbing lots of youtube videos/playlists via youtube-dl, which then lets me watch them on anything and everything than can run kodi commercial-free without jumping through hoops (i.e. browser addons or sideloading third party youtube apps, etc)

I use both. Plex is better for the less technical members of my family. I burned all my wife’s Workout DVDs and she uses it with ease. For HDR movies I prefer Kodi. My understanding is that plex transcodes from the originating machine where as Kodi will transcode on the machine that receives it - so the HDR films get transcoded on a machine with a graphics card.

For some systems they come as simple apps you can just fire up, or you can have the separate apps load up. Not hard to switch between them.

Transcoding on the receiving end doesn’t make sense to me. If you’re trying to save bandwidth, transcoding on the receiving end is obviously pointless. If you’re transcoding just to play an unplayable codec, well, why not just get a better player that supports the codec? What am I missing?

Kodi doesn't do any transcoding, it's up to the player to support the codec.

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