But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.
So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.
Late last year, a vibe-coded app called BookLore appeared and basically brought over everything Calibre did but with much better UX and e-reader integration. The original dev crashed out[0], but the community picked up the project and started reigning in the worst of the slop and maintaining it as Grimmory [1]. It's pretty damn good.
There is also a book fetcher called Shelfmark [2] that integrates with Calibre, ABS, or Grimmory.
[0] and he _might_ be currently trying to push another even more vibe-coded competitor, but that's unconfirmed drama
There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.
Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.
Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
Sounds easy if all you have to do is write a short comment about it. People who actually did it, like the recently retired lead of the Jellyfin project, didn't make it sound like it's "not that difficult" [1].
If you want ot vibe code a project for yourself it's probably reasonable amount of effort. But if you want to build a product, something with polish, something not held together by spit and scotch tape, something reliable, it won't be easy.
From personal experience, the transcoding was the easy part. Building a UX that was intuitive and a backend that catalogued the media accurately required far more attention.
Making something that actually interacts with "the human world" is 100s of times harder than writing any kind of algorithm.
I'd challenge that. Have you looked at the specifications of any reasonably current compression standards? The AVC one is some 900 pages, I think.
Entire communities exist around discussing the strengths and shortcomings of different codec implementations.
I can’t recall if Chromium supports that, I have a feeling Google only include that DRM in Chrome. But if it is available in Chromium then you might be able to build an Electron app.
Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.
But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.
Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.
People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".
Big difference between _audio_ streaming and _video_ streaming servers. Video streaming is much more complex and pretty consolidated, as I mentioned.
Audio streaming is much more manageable: no issues with transcoding, acceleration or subtitling, and a radically simpler UI. Also ID3 tags aren't great but they're a pretty universal standard with lots of databases, you don't need to desperately scrape IMDB/TMBD for info.
As a result there are quite a few music servers, often exposing Subsonic compatible APIs, ranging from the minimalistic to the 'I'm trying to do everything Spotify does'.
They all suffer from the same problems of indexing content. They all have multiple different encoding formats available. And they all need a frontend widget in your client for playback.
I’ve worked with both the audio and video streaming platforms and what you’re describing is grossly inaccurate. The fact that your container format isn’t including video frames doesn’t magically solve any of these issues.
Plus ID3 can be a source of new problems by itself given the way it was implemented…twice.
The answer to every question about how to use/write it is the counter question: well, which software or player do you want it to work with? Here are your 8 mutually incompatible options.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.