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Comment by thesausageking | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to Plex?

Plex is significantly more polished and pleasant to actually use, especially for normals. Kodi has more customizability if you like but it still feels rough around the edges.

Plex is actually a (significantly diverged) fork of Kodi (then called XBMC). They might not share any code at this point.

There was at least one complete rewrite since the OSXBMC devs days.

I'm pretty sure Plex is a complete rewrite that only shares the name of Plex with that fork, and well the inspiration of it as well .

Actually had some people that worked on XBMC go and start Plex, bad blood included.

I used XBMC (and then Kodi) for many years, had it installed on AppleTV, FireTV, etc, etc but I eventually migrated fully to Plex. I found that I prefer Plex over Kodi when dealing with local media.

Eventually Kodi only felt useful if you wanted to dive into the world of streaming movies and shows from various shady sources.

> How does this compare to Plex?

Quite similar, but without all the invasive monitoring and telemetry. For example: you need an "account" to run plex on your local network.

Kind of sad none of the responses really answered the question in detail.

What I would like to know:

1. What features does Plex have that Kodi doesn't?

2. What features does Kodi have that Plex doesn't?

I get that at this point it is somewhat an apples/oranges comparison, but still: As a Plex/Kodi user, what am I not getting that the other provides?

I know Kodi has a lot of plugins, but I'd like to hear of specific examples of plugins and how people use them in a way that you can't with Plex.

Edit: One somewhat useful Reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/mciv5l/kodi_vs_...

I really wanted to move to Kodi to be able to run everything locally (Plex requires a login etc) but it was way too much friction for my use case (and I don't think it is such a unique use case). I keep my media in separate folders for each genre and wanted to do a one-to-one mapping of folder to "library" so that I can just click on, say, "sci-fi" and see all the movies for that in a grid and so on. Plex makes this very easy and for Kodi, I had to do investigate all sorts of workarounds like creating "dynamic views" (or something similar I think) and even then it wasn't as smooth and easy as Plex. Also, some of the features require specific themes which is not a great design IMHO. Basically gave up and have continued with Plex - it seems to be the gold standard in the balance between polish and features (always happy to explore other options though).

Your experience echoes mine to a certain extent.

When searching for a media platform, I tried various ones including Kodi (and the various forks/environments like LibreElec et. al), Plex and others.

I also have a folder hierarchy which Kodi doesn't respect (very annoying) and played around with Plex as well.

However, I am unwilling to log in and share telemetry about my own personal library with Plex.

As such, I went with MythTV, which isn't as slick as Plex or Kodi, but does most of the job (that is, manage my local media library). It lacks in streaming options, including podcasts and the devs seem much more focused on the DVR than anything else.

That said, for what it does, MythTV is pretty good, but there's a lot it doesn't do.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I don't like Plex's telemetry aspects either and am pretty much focused on my own content (e.g. I don't really use Plex TV or other streaming bits). In addition to what I mentioned about my library organization needs, I just need to be able to view/search my content easily (Plex's default grid layout and sorting/filtering options are pretty well done in this regard e.g. being able to sort by Date Added/Release Date etc) and view them on my TV via using Chromecast (Plex's android client is far from perfect but gets the basic job done). If a solution covers these aspects well enough without having to share telemetry, I'll drop Plex in a heartbeat.

>If a solution covers these aspects well enough without having to share telemetry,

MythTV[0] does okay with video and music libraries.

It's available as packages on most distributions[1] which allows me to keep my front end and back ends synched just by performing regular package updates.

It is open source and can also be compiled from source[2] if you prefer it that way.

I run my back end on a VM with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPUs. My front end is a fanless miniPC[3] (I bought it almost three years ago, so I'm sure you can do better now for the same money) which renders 1080p/Stereo (I don't have a surround-sound system, but that's definitely supported) via HDMI pretty flawlessly. I imagine that a newer front end device could easily handle 4K (although I don't have a device to display that) resolution.

Edit: I'd add that the front end and back and can run on the same system, but the physical layout of my home made it more useful to split the two.

The Mythtv Wiki[4] is also pretty good for many set up/configuration issues.

It's not perfect by any measure, but it does the job without telemetry or external dependencies.

Core MythTV development seems pretty active, but the broader "ecosystem" (plugins, addons, etc.) is very weak.

[0] https://www.mythtv.org/

[1] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Packages#Targeted_Linux_Distribu...

[2] https://www.mythtv.org/download

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NXPSCK9

[4] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Main_Page

Edit: Fixed front end/back end. Added the missing link.

Kodi allows you to regex your way to any folder hierarchy: https://kodi.wiki/view/Scrapers

Not to be an ass but why not store your films in a flat layout (one folder per film) then use the built in features like "movies > by genre > sci-fi"?

Because metadata doesn’t exist. There is the directory (NOT a folder). There is the movie file. End of report.

Because of a limited world view. Movies are ONLY one thing. SciFi OR Comedy. Not both. Never both.

Because the idea behind a genre-based movie directory hierarchy is _genius_, and the tens of thousands of people that don’t fight the practical organization methods of media catalogs are sheep.

Plex focuses on having a server component that transcodes and their “Plex Pass” service for better connectivity, enabling lightweight native players for all of your devices. This way you can watch any of your content on anything even over cellular, even if it’s a weird format that the device wouldn’t easily support.

This is a departure from the traditional XBMC-on-device that also acts as the client trying to play any format of content.

Kodi is amazing and I’d use it if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t want a new interface, I simply want my “owned” content to show up as Yet Another App on my stream boxes and phones. Plex fits that bill.

don't quote me on this but i think kodi/xbmc started back before smartphones weren't really a thing. people mostly had 1 desktop computer and they would watch movies on their monitor or with the computer plugged into the TV.

plex was made later on when having multiple devices (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet etc) was a bit more common, so now instead of having all your media stuck on one device you instead run it on a server and connect to that server using an app on each device.

so that's the fundamental difference between them anyway. one is mainly design to be used on 1 devices while the other is design to be used on many

Jellyfin is more like Plex. Kodi is more like Roku.

- Plex is a closed source fork-and-re-write of an MacOS XBMC port that was codenamed OSXBMC.

- Jellyfin is a fork of Emby at the version before it went closed source.

- Emby was an open-source re-implementation of Plex.

- Genealogy is weird.

Kodi is for power users, Plex is for anyone who just wants a place to host their media collection.

You can mix-and-match too! Plex puts out an official Kodi plugin: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi .

Unfortunately Plex stopped caring it years ago..

Does anyone know if Kodi offers streaming media over local network or internet similar to Plex?

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