Hacker News Reader

Comment by Glide | Hacker News Reader

I just _refreshed_ my setup replacing my shield and trying to get Emby and Kodi working together…

This looks great especially since I have complete collections of various sci if stuff I loved growing up (Star Trek: TNG, Star Gate). The big thing for me is how this supports sitting on the couch and looking for something to watch.

View on HN

I've been using Jellyfin on Windows server (Arc GPU) for server, Shield for client, it's been working pretty well. What hardware are you using?

I am thinking about picking up a shield as a client in a similar setup. If you're using subtitles -- does the shield handle them well? That's the part that keeps breaking in the native TV client.

I use Kodi with the jellyfin plugins on my shield and it works well. Subtitle support is pretty good but occasionally I need to restart the app to get new subs to display for a show.

The native jellyfin client is ok for simple things but it's far more limited than Kodi.

The subtitles I use are most often ones in separate files alongside the video files, named appropriately for the jellyfin server to see it. I think embedded subs work well too, sometimes needing burning in, but my server can handle transcoding.

There are some quirks with using Jellyfin+Kodi with external subs. It used to be solved by the "direct play" feature in Jellyfin4Kodi where it would just pass Kodi a link to the SMB/NFS shares, but the newest releases of Jellyfin have deprecated and hidden the server side feature that enabled that. I had a talk with the devs about it on GitHub and they don't really know if/when it's gonna come back.

The Shield uses the same Jellyfin client as any AndroidTV/GoogleTV box. You can use Kodi on the Shield if you want native support for more subtitle formats, but that's also true of other AndroidTV/GoogleTV devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com