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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC.

Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.

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BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player.

iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks).

I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.

The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over.

I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.

I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.

Worthwhile work, to me. I’m gonna listen to this music until I perish, might as well fix what’s bothering me.

The more I think about it the more there needs to be an ID3 equivalent to video media so the meta data is stored with-in the movie container versus a central database.

Kodi and their meta helpers can create a local meta file. Next step is to push it into the media container.

CppCon and other video recorded events would benefit from this. The shared video file would contain the details and remove the energy to search for the source and other meaningful information.

google "metadata in MKV video file" seems to show that MKV already supports something like that, and mkv is already a container format. One problem would be that some collections of video acquired from dozens of sources/people who did the encode won't by any means be 100% standards compliant MKV.

This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.

I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.

Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]

1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick

> "Usually i remember what i was watching"

You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.

Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.

> I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking

curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)

It's not like the plots are complex :D

Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.

Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.

Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.

I still have artifacts in my dirs of TOSORT, TODO, and DONE.

I've resorted to manually tracking some non-Plex/Jellyfin shows on Obsidian manually :D

It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.

I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.

Plus the whole *arr stack.

Usually subtitles are not that hard to find.

Yes but there is something nice about automatic subtitles. Less friction in my life.

Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.

If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.

If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.

Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.

Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.

I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing.

Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.

Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.

And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before

I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide.

I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.

> you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show

You've just described the media experience. When I was a kid I spent so much time just flipping through channels. The same activity today is a vastly different and inferior experience. Modern televisions take forever to change channels.

It seems like all home technology adds friction and inscrutable failure modes in order to gain functionality/flexibility.

"Smart" seems to mean "powerful but complicated and frustrating."

I get the functionality benefits. I just don't want to pay the friction price.

My personal media library has over 600 moves and 70+ shows and around 8,000 books. There is no way I can watch and read all of it in my lifetime. But I do find joy in being a little librarian and I also care deeply about art and like to keep my own little nest. All of it is sharable with anyone i like anywhere in the world. I do use jellyfin but i don't think I have ever switched its theme though.

Either way, yeah one of the joys of running a home lab to me is definitely the managing and maintainence to me and I don't think its any lesser pursuit than watching the media itself

>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies.

Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.

1. https://firecore.com/infuse

Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't.

And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.

Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone.

Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent

Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper

i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened.

kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).

That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead.

It's good most of the time, but not 100%.

ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.

It does. Has for a while.

There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.

It does work with Kodi, you just need to add a client-side plugin for Kodi to support it: https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip

Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.

Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.

I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN.

Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.

Jellyfin does all these things too, and it’s free.

I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played

Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.

The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.

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