Home Media Streaming

[Gödel]

I recently signed up for the free Plex service on my smart TV. (Aside: being free, it's pretty limited. I joined because I wanted to watch the classic Fellini film La Dolce Vita, and that was the only source I found. But there were too many ill-timed commercials, the closed-captioning sucked, but worst of all, they cut off the last 15 minutes .)

Checking further into Plex, I see that it is "cross-platform", and I could use it as a media server, and my little Sonos One speaker can supposedly connect to Plex.

This is of major interest to me, because I have a small collection of ≈130 record albums on my PCs, and it would be great to be able to play them through the Sonos phone app to that One speaker.

So my question is, what are your preferred Media Server apps for your home streaming requisites? Do any of you use Plex?

 

[Mercutio]

I've been providing Plex for about as long as Plex has been around, but I don't really use it myself. Plex is mostly for people outside my home, and it is because it has an easy external authentication system for access that I keep it. That being said, Plex has gotten worse and worse and worse and worse over time with more useless nonsense and features I actually liked being removed. I do have a Lifetime Plex Pass so I am at least not impacted by the recent demand that external users get a Streaming Pass for monthly access, but I still don't see it as a favorable direction for the project.

Jellyfin and Emby are home media servers with similar goals but neither has the external access component that makes Plex worthwhile.

Some hints:

Plex is much more reliable on a Linux host. Also, it really, really does run well on $150 Celeron N150 systems because the builtin graphics cores can handle a half dozen transcodes simultaneously. You want a recent-ish Intel PC to run your server. Don't bother running it on an ARM NAS; unless it's got a Tegra K1 or a premium Qualcomm SoC, it won't have the power to transcode at all.

Make Granular Libraries. This is a general library management tip, but I've found it useful to have the classic TV Shows and Movies, but also Kid TV and Kid Movies (handy for manually enforcing age restrictions), TV Documentaries, Movie Documentaries, Stage Performance (I have a lot of recorded operas and ballets), Exercise, Tutorial, Stand-Up Comedy, TV Anime, Movie Anime, K Drama, Dropout.TV, Youtube Downloads and Home Movies. Because of how I keep things, I also have Disney, Star Wars and Super-Hero content broken out as libraries simply because those things get used very frequently.

Use Kometa to provide more information about your content. Kometa adds little badgets to the posters in Plex and autogenerates playlists, so for example it creates lists of all the TV shows you have from each TV network or streaming service and indicates whether movies have won awards.

Pay attention to file naming conventions. {Edition-4k} is handy or {Edition-Blade Runner Super Special 2nd AD cut 40th Anniversary}. Filebot is very helpful for keeping file names in check if you don't know where to start with that.

Some TV shows are extremely difficult to get properly named for Plex. Battlestar Galactica and Adventure Time are poster children for this. Check how things are named on the TVDB for those guys and conform to that. In some cases (VERY SPECIFICALLY Doctor Who), the debate over order is so divisive and I've told my users that it will just never be available. Plex will never get it right to the satisfaction of its fans and I got tired of my users bitching about it.

Don't bother using Plex for Music. Plex says it is good at music. Plex is LYING.

As I said, I don't really use Plex. I like being able to control presentation better via Kodi, which also DOES handle music better, but it doesn't really work outside my house. I do pay attention to it. I want it to work for other people.

Jellyfin is the guy all the open source folks like. It's fine but it doesn't have the wide support on smart TVs and it doesn't have easy remote access. You could roll your own but personally my uncles have a hard enough time with the concept of opening a browser and visiting a web page to type in a code, which is all they need for Plex to work. I don't want it to be any harder than that.

 

[Gödel]

Thanks, Merc. My main usage would be for audio; I only have a few dozen video files, and those are mostly relatively short music videos.

(This is the longest [but in a little shorter variation], about the brilliant gospel performer Sister Rosetta Tharp, "The Godmother of Rock & Roll".)

One feature I would like to have is the ability to play an album emulating the old-fashioned way of a previous millennium, when I would put an album on the turntable, put the needle down just inside the outer rim, play the whole "side", then turn over the album and repeat on the flip side.

I. E., I'd like to have the ability to play the album in "track-number order". I haven't found the way to have VLC do that, though I've taken the trouble to ensure that the audio files have the track-number metadata field filled in correctly.

 

[sedrosken]

Say what you will about Jellyfin, it's worked on everything I've tried and I refuse to pay for Plex Pass.

 

[Mercutio]

Plex Pass wasn't a big deal when it was $75 and I saw it as contributing to a small project.
sed, I don't have a problem with Jellyfin as such but I also don't see it doing anything better than just running Kodi. I guess it's a central point of configuration instead of having to configure per Kodi install, but we're only talking about filling out a couple textboxes worth of data. On Kodi's side, absolutely every audio codec ever will pass through to your AVR or soundbar if you have one, which IIRC is a realy weakness for Jellyfin.

Newtun: Isn't track order the normal way to listen to an album? Or are we thinking that no one listens to entire albums to begin with.
Anyway, easy fix for your track order woes is to add the track number to the filename. MediaMonkey can do that for you really easily, although you do need to make sure you have the disc number as well for multi-album compilations.

 

[Mercutio]

Regarding music services and local streaming, there's plenty of perfectly capable options. Lyrion (formerly Squeezebox) is a decent option for most people. I use a tool called ScreamRouter because many music streaming tools don't support arbitrary bit depth and audio channels specifically for lossless formats, and those files are the ones I most want to be able to listen to.

In either case, the thing you need to do is make sure that your filenames and metadata are immaculate. MediaMonkey is very helpful with this, but it's important to go through your collection one directory at a time to make sure some goblin with a coke habit didn't randomly provide conflicting album names or omit the disc number on two disc sets, something I've seen even with embedded data from commercially provided music. It's kind of a satisfying project and it gives you a reason to go through your collection anyway.

I use Audiobookshelf for streaming Audiobooks and locally stored Podcasts and Kavita for PDFs, Epubs and comic books, with external access arbitrated via Cloudflare Tunnels (which, yes, would also work for Jellyfin). Both of those services have a very Plex-like interface and similar concepts in organization by Library rather than folder structures.

 

[Gödel]

I was going to wait until I got my member name changed from Newtun to Gödel, but maybe it's better to do this now, so I can "hide" after that.

(That reminds me of the Rodney Dangerfield joke:​

"I solved my drinking problem, I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm still drinking, I just use a different name". )​

True Confession; forgive me, for I have sinned: for my Sonos speaker, I have been using their iPhone app, and connecting to my album collection hosted on my Windows PC, using MS's "native" uPNP/DLNA app, Windows Media Streaming.

That "just works", and automatically uses the track # metadata field to play albums in order. (BTW, decades ago, instead of just playing an album, I would sometimes pick the tracks I wanted to listed to, and try to drop the needle in just the right place.)

But after my Disk Issues on that PC, I started to think about alternative media serving software. I had already moved my pihole VM from that Windows PC to one of my Ubuntu ones, in case I couldn't fix the disk problems.

 

[Mercutio]

It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at least if I tell it to play a goddamned 6 channel FLAC, it'll actually output on six speakers like it's supposed to. There's probably a fix for this, but at this point I'm waiting for it to finish doing whatever the hell it's been doing for a couple days while downloading the wrong album art and randomly attributing some mix of composer, soloist or conductor to the files. It's probably a simple change to switch it to not doing metadata lookups. I'm just waiting to see exactly how wrong it gets.

Screamrouter works for me but on the other hand and I can use Kodi as well, but no one else who has access to my media collections really grasps how Kodi handles things. To me, they're not any different, but Kodi's search facilities aren't great and apparently that's confusion compared to building libraries that follow folder structures instead of flat lists.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, I don't tend to use Jellyfin for library management per se, rather I use it for an easy playback interface that isn't just loading files into VLC or whatever through the network. I find I don't trust anything but myself to do the tagging/album art fetching.

 

[Mercutio]

The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.

 

[Mercutio]

We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming will just be HTML5 interpretation, much like Tizen and Roku have.

Likewise, Google is planning to merge ChromeOS and Android and started demanding developer signatures for apps to install anything at all.
I think we're looking at the swift end to open systems on entertainment devices. Androidx86 is still technically a thing, but there are already applications that won't run on it because it's missing right management components. LibreElec is basically just enough Linux to run Kodi, but who knows if that can even be made to do all the other things we'd expect to find on our entertainment devices? Windows is also a second class citizen in this space; some services don't have full desktop clients and even services like Netflix won't stream in full quality unless you're using the most up to date version of Edge.

Sometimes, you just realize that the world is turning to shit.

 

[ddrueding]

Yup. I've completely bailed on the idea of an app for a product I'm working on. It will just be fancy new web stuff and rendered client-side. Not worth dealing with Apple or Google.