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CSDude

If you have an Apple TV, use https://firecore.com/infuse.

To be fair, it's not exactly the same as Plex. But it covers many of my use cases;

- Organizes your media on the fly

- Does not do useless transcoding (it was a huge issue back in ~ 2016 for Plex).

- Can directly connect to SMB shares, my Synology NAS.

- Does not require anything running on the server, so it does not matter your NAS has a decade old MIPS CPU.

- List files from multiple cloud providers.

- Can also sync with Trakt if you want to keep track of what you watch.

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I use Infuse together with https://put.io/ over WebDAV paired with https://chill.institute/

It basically gives me Netflix for all the content in the world, would recommend! Put.io does instant downloads if anyone else on the service has ever downloaded the content, which is basically always the case for me.

Not clear what chill.institute is, private tracker/newshost?

It’s a torrent aggregator/search engine

Infuse is great especially coupled with jellyfin, there's also MrMC but the presentation is nowhere near as good.

Has Jellyfin caught up to Plex yet? I tried it a couple of years ago, and it was miles off.

One important thing Jellyfin won't do is deciding to block something on its own.

To actually answer your question without snark, it’s still miles behind. I give the competition a shot once every year or two to see what’s up. It’s never even close for someone that prioritises the things that I prioritise. Every Plex competitor I’ve used makes me feel like I’m using a Linux media player in 2008. Some people get off to that. I don’t.

For some reason the best clients are on Apple devices only, that Infuse and Swiftfin. mpv shim is ok too. That’s my only gripe since I barely touch the actual Jellyfin server interface, it just works. If I had Plex I would also use Infuse too so there’s really no difference except that one is open source, doesn’t phone home, and doesn’t require a monthly subscription.

Is there a benefit to using Infuse over NFS vs Infuse connecting to Plex? Wouldn't you lose Plex's ability to customize everything (naming, album art, collections, watchlist), not to mention syncing with other non Apple devices in the house.

The title of the movie is in the file name, I search what I want to watch and it comes up, what more would customization do for me? Sounds like a time sink.

I never had any desire to sync with a device. The movies are from the internet. I don’t want to deal with any hardware uptime or compatibility issues. When I see friends use each other’s Plex servers, half of the time the movie doesn’t play properly because it’s transcoding or something and they spend several minutes fiddling with settings (sometimes not succeeding). Never had this problem streaming from Google Drive with Infuse.

Infuse have similar customization, you mainly loose sync to nonapple devices and you cant do transcoding for slow internet connections. The advantage is that you dont need something that can host plex, just a dumb fileshare (or a cloud drive like icloud or google drive). Many routers can fx do the fileshare for you, so you dont need a server to host on.

In %99 of cases these data are resovled from the filename in my use case.

Infuse is a subscription service, as such, is a nonstarter for me.

They have a lifetime subscription

So they do.. but everyone needs it. For my Plex, I paid for lifetime and gave accounts to my mother and brother and a few friends. With infuse, everyone needs to pony up. That is a non starter for our use case. Glad to know they do offer it though.

On my parents' Apple TV I just added myself as a secondary user and downloaded Infuse and they have access to it through their account

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