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Comment by wussboy | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Jellyfin because Plex refuses to just show me the files in my directory. Why can’t you just let me have a directory view? Makes my blood boil just topping it out.

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What? You can.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200392126-using-the-library...

> The Folders option is available for all media types, and lets you browse the media folder structure directly based on the folder hierarchy on disk. Browse By Folder is a sticky setting, letting you use Grid, List, or Summary view to browse your drive’s directory structure.

That view will show you all the media it recognized in a folder view. If you have any files that it does not recognize, it will not show them. You’re out of luck off you have something unusual (like a downloaded Rugby Union game). It. Will. Not. Show. It.

I have videos that I've pulled down with youtube-dl in mine. Like random 'let's plays', random concert footage, one off JRE episodes, etc. I put them in "videos".

I've accidentally put TV shows in the movies category and had them not show like you describe.

You have to put it in a library that's classified as "Other", and then it will show all video files it's capable of playing as regular media without necessarily requiring you to descend into the folder hierarchy view. I have several thousand home videos, YouTube downloads, and other "custom content" that's handled this way.

I agree. This is a peeve for me. I ripped toons for my kids and I can’t get the movie or to show view to display them appropriately. A directory view would have been perfect

As a workaround until you find a better solution, perhaps you could exploit the custom artwork feature.

If you have say "movie.mp4" then make two copies of a jpeg named "movie.jpg" and "movie-fanart.jpg" alongside the movie file. Plex will then show this.

You could generate the jpeg using ImageMagick or similar from a base image (per show say) and with text overlay.

I have some scripts that does this and it's better than nothing.

You can view directories, you just have to switch to folder view. It isn't a great directory browser though and that view isn't always sticky so YMMV.

I don't get this. I'm a Jellyfin user too, and I've never seen an option for a directory view in the web UI.

At least my movies are reasonably well-catalogued. My TV shows are still a mess because of how inflexible their naming policy is.

I don't understand this desire, why would you ever want that? The point of using something like Plex is to organize by metadata.

Because some people just prefer something to be laid out a certain way. I have that with music for example, I don't care about albums other than a grouping unit for files (my playlist is flat though). Album art, etc is otherwise irrelevant to me, but some music apps will fetishize organization by album, etc and the art is highlighted etc.

Oh man, I can't find a single usable music app on Linux. I've used MusicBee for years on wine, but I'm stuck on an older version (for stability) and now that I want to run all of my stuff on a Rpi4 I'm screwed (wine+x86 app is a pain). I installed quodlibet, rythmbox, clementine, amarok... All hot garbage when it comes to UI layout. So for now I'm still running MusicBee on an old laptop and controlling playback via the DLNA plugin and the excellent BubbleUPNP.

Did you ever try out gmusicplayer? Depending on what you are looking for it might be something for you. Very customizable and for 'advanced users'. It allows you to combine using Folders and tags for example. Want all it to list all Albums of a single artist in a single Folder? Done. Want it to show you all Artists in One Folder and then again show the contents of that Folder but only those relating to the picked artist? I think it is pretty fun!

Ugly though, if you ask me ;)

I'll try it. At this point I've forgotten the ones I've tried over the years. Every year or so I tend to install everything that a Google search turns up. Some I immediately uninstall. Others I kick the tires for a while but ultimately find some major flaw.

I've been a huge fan of the mpd+ncmpcpp combo for quite some time now.

This ^ it’s a beautiful thing, seriously. Curses based front end in your terminal with mpd. Light weight and easily integrates with things like polybar

I'll try it out

I personally like [TauonMusicBox](https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/) a lot.

Check out mpd+ncmpcpp, or Navidrome. I use the latter.

Audacious with the winamp skin mostly works for me, I still miss a few features though the core of it is there. (Global hotkeys for a jump-to and queue songs prompt, nobody except audacious has gotten this down since winamp)

manual change for metadata is bigger work when you have big library, move or rename folder is easy and fast from terminal of FTP you dont require custom web app

and auto-metadata from IMDB and other API is bad if you have niche videos (me: documentaires for anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism). so bad it can replace good data with bad data (example sub.media/c/trouble documentary series becomes "good trouble" series)

It sounds like you agree that Plex is not what you should be using in that usecase.

hello using jellyfin for months no idea how to folder view. can you explain?

I use Emby but it house be similar - you should be able to have a library tyoe to “folder” or maybe files. Then it just allows you to browse. But this has downsides

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