Jellyfin's "management" of my media catalog strongly drove me away from Jellyfin. It was terrible at dealing with seasons of shows, with dealing with subdirectories. So much frustration.

Casting from my phone also got de-synced & broke a lot. I couldn't find a good way to skip/scrub forwards or backwards a little bit. Sometimes the themeing would break & the app became unusable without restart.

It was really really cool having jellyfin-mpv-shim running on my desktop, and Chromecast elsewhere. But Jellyfin was straight up not working for me, not listing a bunch of my media, not making it navigable, and the Android app's dodginess all ruined things for me. I went back to UPnP/DLNA, whose apps are a little cruder (Gerbera for MediaServer, BubbleUPnP for control, Rygel PlayBin for MediaRenderer), everything basically just works and it's baked into many devices/tv's.

I tried Kodi a bunch of times. Nobody else in my house would/could use it. Half the time I’d end up stuck in some weird modal menu I couldn’t get out of, so I can hardly blame them. Its ui is really weird.

Jellyfin fixed that. Other people in my house use it easily, a friend uses the web ui over Tailscale, and my messing-with-tech versus watching-things ratio is finally looking good.

Something like Plex/Jellyfin will make it simpler to share your library to your friends or family (over e.g. Tailscale).

The whole *arr thing makes it even better with automated download and upgrade.

For my personal watching? Almost agreed. Jellyfin does make it a little more interaction free to watch on multiple devices and to binge watch without interruptions an entire series.

But I can live without that.

The one thing it offers that folders do not is a simple way to interact with the video library when guests are using it.

They can grab a mouse and meander over the available shows with no explanation and watch what they want within minutes of being shown the link without exposing my nas to them or giving them the ability to alter my media files without my knowledge.

I can run this via Kodi's jellyfin plugin, via OSMC on a raspberry pi, on my living room TV. It automatically uses my tv remote, and says in big letters "TV Shows" and "Movies". Anyone at my house can use it, with ease, even the absolute least technical.