A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Q: But I need to share with family who aren't technical
A: IINA (Mac) or mpv.net (Windows) give them a normal GUI that uses MPV underneath. Or just... teach them?play movie.mkvisn't rocket science.
Spoken like somebody that hasn’t been stuck with family tech support or tech support in general.
There is a whole lot to jellyfin that mpv doesnt cover.
I'm glad youre enjoying the setup, but its hardly a replacement for jellyfin in the vast majority of cases.
the point of jellyfin and Plex is that it plays everywhere, ie. TV, mobile, remotely; not just on a PC connected to local network. although neat, this is far from a replacement for a media manager/remote streamer
I set up Plex/Jellyfin specifically to get away from having to manage media manually, it tracks watch states, gets subtitles, transcodes for me when I'm traveling, and does all of that for family too.
MPV is neat but its just a standard media player app like VLC, not really anywhere near the same concept as Jellyfin.
I'm happy you're discovering the Linux CLI, but this is pretty ridiculous. mpv, vlc, mplayer, etc. all serve very different uses from jellyfin.
i mean… sure. some neat tricks in here i wasn’t aware of, but asking my mom to open the terminal… i mean it’s not rocket science but that doesn’t make it accessible. all the scripting and stuff that you’re talking; that stuff comes in the Jellyfin box. honestly, it might be worth it to have both if you have users that aren’t comfortable in the terminal
For sure!
wut the fuck. I use Jellyfin because I don't want to have to do shit by hand. I fucking click the grab button in Jellyseer and then press play. if I wanted harder than that, I wouldn't bother setting up a media server in the first place.
You wrote this shit with an LLM, didn't you?
English is not my native language 😄
Just putting it out there, as a Linux sysadmin for over 400 VMs. Even I don't want to be cli running my media, that's why I use jellyfin.
It's good that people know you can do it, but most won't as they just want to click a button to get going.
Completely agree.. I can see myself doing this years ago when I had nothing better to do. But not doing it for long. And don't get me started on the convenient subtitles download and sync in Jellyfin!
I just want to note that Jellyfin MPV Shim exists and can do most of this MPV stuff while still getting the benefits of Jellyfin. You're putting a lot of emphasis on Plex-specific limitations (which Jellyfin doesn't have obviously) and transcoding (which is a FEATURE to stopgap an improper media player setup, not a limitation of Jellyfin).
Pretty much every single "Pro" is not exclusive to pure MPV vs. Jellyfin MPV Shim, which mainly leaves you with the cons. Also as another commenter said, I set my Jellyfin up so that my friends and family can use it, and that's its primary value to me. I feel like a lot of this post should be re-oriented towards MPV as a great media player, not against Jellyfin as a media platform.
If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB mount in the file explorer and double click it. On Windows you can mount it as a network drive (like V: for videos) so even non-technical users understand it. I don't understand how mpv is easier for that use case.
With systems like Jellyfin and Plex, you can (and should!) turn off transcoding when streaming at home. The only times you should enable transcoding are when:
Transcoding is very useful, because otherwise you'd need multiple copies of the same movie to handle different environments. Transcoding can dynamically adjust the bitrate based on the connection speed.
Q: But I need to share with family who aren't technical A: IINA (Mac) or mpv.net (Windows) give them a normal GUI that uses MPV underneath. Or just... teach them? play movie.mkv isn't rocket science.
LoL . You're completely out of touch with reality
The UX just isn't there for MPV. Jellyfin isn't always ideal but it gives an interface roughly on par with a streaming service. Why should I replace that with a tool like MPV? I don't need keyboard controls, I watch from my couch. It seems like all downsides to me.
Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn't create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And "volume" is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.
You are technically right but as a human who just wants to watch “The Devil Wear’s Prada” after a long day at work it would be too frustrating.
You have to go through more clicks and more typing to play your media on MPV. On the other hand I can just use my remote to browse through my Jellyfin library after just opening an app.
So, let me get this straight - you're saying using command line to play video instead of a gui?
Tell me, how does one do this on a TV? On an iPad? Phone?
Your excitement for command line belies an experience of nothing but GUI, so it's something of a novelty to use command line.
Dude, get ahold of yourself. I probably wrote more command line stuff before you were born than you've ever thought of - I'm not going backwards.
(As a clue, wrote my first Fortran program before PC's were even a thought at IBM).
Fuck cli except for managing systems. Even then quite often gui is faster by orders of magnitude, mostly to kickoff scripts to do what I need. GUI was a godsend, and Xerox Parc's efforts created a common GUI language for us, thankfully was embraced. I refuse to go backwards.
And forcibly teach non-technical people to use CLI?
You are exactly the type of person that Saturday Night Live lampooned decades ago.
Kodi is a good player on TV. Phones and tablets have VLC and MPV.
You're missing the point - he's elevating cli above all else, which you don't have on TV or mobile.
Yes, I know there are media clients, I've used them all.
Besides, he's not doing anything different than running a "server stack" (which isn't accurate, he's still running a server, the device hosting the media services, even if they're native to the OS).
Cons: No pretty web UI (I consider this a pro)
...considered a pro but listed under cons...?
Anyway, you can fix that with Euphonica
Great writeup! You are correct that the skeleton is there in a "unix philosophy" manner. Depending on preferences and use cases, it could be perfectly functional.
When I was first getting my media server going I experimented with a more minimal solution like this. Eventually I went with jellyfin and kodi as a client on some devices. I like all the structure. Jellyfin is a bit of a drag to use due to bloat. Kodi is lighter on the client end.
I shared my files via SMB on the local network. First used VLC player to watch on mobile. It's robust. There is also an android MPV player available if you wish. If you have a lot of media it gets tiresome to navigate throug with either of those. Nova Video Player does some of stuff you'd normally offload to a server like remembering what you've already watched. So that was good, but then instead of having the bloat on the server, you have bloat on the phone, which is less convenient. I disagree that consuming media solely via a PC is civilized. It's tolerable in certain situations.
If you have other people to share with who aren't inclined this way, it's kind of a jerk move to force them to accommodate this aesthetic preference. Even if not wanting to run jellyfin there are sleeker media serving solutions available for a middle ground. If it's just for yourself and other kindred spirits, then no reason not to indulge in the minimalism to whatever degree you find satisfying.
I use a very similar setup, and with a custom UI mpv looks even better. Even on mobile I use an app with libmpv backend which plays my NAS media and anything I throw at it. Also, the ability to smoothly scrub video, especially on touchscreens is a very rare treasure among video players but mpv handles it with no struggle...
I guess jellyfin is for those who want a netflix experience with movie posters, descriptions, and lots of QoL
