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Comment by giamma | Hacker News Reader

I have an android TV running Kodi. Kodi connects via SMB to my NAS (Odroid HC-4, OpenMediaVault) and can easily show all my content.

Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?

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Depends on how much you value your Kodi setup and how many "difficult to auto match" shows | movies you have.

I wanted to run Kodi | JellyFin in parallel (two Kodi client Android TV's in house) so that visitors with iPhones | Androids | Tables could browse content.

The local Kodi TV clients used the NAS box MariDB to hold meta data held in the local to content .NFO files (show ID's, descriptions, etc)

I've held off on that as the JellyFin docs are not clear and the small experiments I tried in isolation proved tricky to resolve issues.

The issues being getting JellyFin to load details from local.nfo files w/out making changes and|or getting JellyFin to not make additional .INFO files (more or less duplicates) and|or getting JellyFin to not trash existing artwork with new downloads.

I'm sure there are solutions here (eg: JellyFin can use seperate directories for it's meta-data (but then doesn't read the local .nfo files to get ambiguous shows 'right')), I've yet to put the hard hours in and these are the kinds of hiccups you may face.

It's moot if you have a small collection | don't care about existing artwork | etc.

IIRC you can disable transcoding on fly by server and trust the network | viewing client to handle full original content, etc.

I like JellyFin and used Emby in the past and use small JellyFin setups today - I just haven't resolved the issues in pointing it at a large curated collection and letting it rip making it's own parallel meta data w/out affecting pre-existing meta data.

As someone else mentioned, the benefit of Jellyfin is it updates with newly added media quite consistently. I previously was a heavy Kodi user, on a small Android TV set top box. I now use Jellyfin exclusively, without transcoding as you mentioned.

Another benefit I've found is it's much easier to add new subtitle to a show/movie, without needing to setup specific subtitle databases as I did with Kodi.

The only issue of note is the occasional crash, but given the level of polish with Jellyfin, and zero cost, it feels absurd to mention it. Oh, and if you have multiple household members, checkout Jellyseerr [0]. It lets others easily request shows/movies (which you can get notified about and approve) without bugging you.

[0] https://github.com/Fallenbagel/jellyseerr

I'm not a Jellyfin user, but I use Emby, which has the same ancestry and similar features.

I can connect to my media server from literally anywhere in the world, using basically any device. I have a Chromecast with Google TV that I pack with me when we go away, and I pop it in the TV, configure wifi and I have my entire media collection right there. My phone, laptop, tablet and the wife's devices all have the client installed & configured.

I have friends and family that I share my media collection with and they are on the other side of the planet. All I give them is a URL, username+password and they are off to the races.

If this is not your use case, then Kodi with SMB is probably more than good enough.

Single-client is IMO where Kodi shines. This way you also have less complexity as Kodi doesn’t need a ton of things that are integrated in Jellyfin, I’d not switch if you don’t have any pain points with this set up.

There is a Jellyfin add-on for Kodi which you could use if you want to keep using Kodi for other stuff like streaming. That's what I do (Kodi runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to the TV) and it works fine, though honestly I'm not a particularly heavy or advanced user so my needs are low. Another advantage of that setup is that I can use the Jellyfin clients on my laptop while using Kodi for the TV.

I had the same setup until recently. I always had troubles with Kodi not indecing very well my movies; and also when wartching my moview far from home I had to copy them first, than think about marking them as "watched" in my library - and if I stopped watching mi-movie that was even more complicated.

Really, Jellyfin has been quite the upgrade. The indexing is better, I can watch things far from home, everything is there. As a bonus, I can create accounts for close friends/family so they can watch what I download without hassle.

Just try it.

I had this setup with a Netgear NAS (old and slow). I switched to a better NAS and Jellyfin and could not be happier. Well, I could be happier because Jellyfin has some quirks, but I'm pretty happy.

The main difference is that it works everywhere, from any device on the LAN (browser, iPad, Android phone, you name it), and even remotely (using Tailscale, to avoid exposing Jellyfin to the world). It's like you have your own little Netflix that you can access from absolutely anywhere.

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