Or just... teach them? play movie.mkv isn't rocket science.
Instructions on how to switch to HDMI 1 are currently taped to the back of my mom's TV remote
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Reminds me of:
Most remote design is honestly atrocious. Somehow they keep hiding "source" in random spots, when it should be one of the most important buttons. The obscure pictograms are all over the place, and most buttons will never be used by anyone.
One of my favorite remotes had the sources split across the top. Composite, Component, VGA, HDMI. And if you hit the button twice it'd cycle through the different ports of that type.
Never found a remote like that again. Now they just throw a menu to slowly browse through.
My parent's TV is absolutely terrible, and the source menu is a big part of it.
It doesn't show sources that have not sent any input since the TV was turned on. So when trying to get the Switch on it, I'd need to start the console first, then push the source button... and the menu is so slow to appear that the Switch has gone back to sleep mode before I can reach it..
God how can those tv menus be so slow... do they (try to) call home on every press of a button?? Infuriating
They run their own full OS these days on under powered SoCs to cut costs. All so they can claim to be a "smart" TV until of course the flow of updates stops a year after manufacture and all the apps stop working. Then it's back to being dumb as well as being a massive security hole on your network.
@Peffse @brsrklf our ancient Blaupunkt has a variant of this: https://interlook.eu/product-eng-3115-Universal-remote-control-for-BLAUPUNKT-TV-TV-support-SMART.html . Alas, the ones you actually need are the HDMI ports, which they don't give you.
It's even worse when your remote is covered with buttons to Netflix, YouTube, Prime and other random bullshit streaming services. I physically removed two rows of buttons from the remote of the TV I bought last year, after accidentally pushing some of them too many times
The obliviousness to the layers of knowledge and understanding to comfortably issue play movie.mk is impressive honestly.
That was a long winded way of saying you don't know what Jellyfin actually is or does. Mpv is a client, it only fills the role that the various Jellyfin clients perform and a better comparison would be against a heavier weight media player such as Kodi.
What you suggest works well enough if you have a reliable network link to share CIFS or NFS over, but what do you do when away from home on a rubbish link that doesn't have bandwidth to stream all your high quality bluray rips? You want transcoding in that situation.
Also, I'm a seasoned Unix sysadmin who knows his way around the cli and I can say with certainty this isn't for people who know the cli, it's for people who just want to prove you can do anything from the cli even if suboptimal.
It misses the primary use case for me: streaming to TV. I used to use minidlna, but the UX on my TV sucked, and Jellyfin was a pure upgrade. I can count the times I've watched more than 30a of my media (to test something) on anything other than my TV on one hand, and all of those are on a tablet using cached files.
If I did watch media on my laptop or desktop, I'd mount a network share and use VLC or something.
Thanks for this.
It really misses the point of why you'd want Jellyfin in the first place. Share a link to a film and give people the optionoption to watch it? Read something about a film before deciding toto watch it? Start watching something on Kodi then finish it later on your laptop?
How would mpv answer any of these…?
Or if you have good hardware that doesn't need the transcoding. If I was loading up h265 video on my server, I'd need to convert it to h264 or something else compatible if I wanted to use it with my iPad, since it's old enough it doesn't support doing anything but software decoding of that codec, and it doesn't have the strongest processor.
- The "No Plex Shares Needed" Share
Send someone an SMB/NFS share to your media. They install MPV. They can now browse and play your media library like it's local. No Plex accounts, no streaming limits, no transcoding quality loss.
Yeah, that’s not tenable for anyone but the nerdiest users. None of my users know what an SMB share is. They know Plex is the icon they click on to watch the movies I get them.
I’m glad this exists but the Netflix-like experience Plex offers is key to adoption by normal people. Aside from the yt-dlp integration, it sounds like DLNA sharing via PMS or XBMC from way back.
I have a buddy who won't switch his streaming box because he thinks his in-laws will be too confused by a different button layout on the remote.
My SO is reasonably technically inclined, and still keeps forgetting they have the SMB share on there. It's literally a folder like any other on their PC.
They do remember both the IP/port (our TV sucks and loses WiFi periodically, and Jellyfin forgets the info) and the URL (can't use TLS on the TV apparently...). And that inconvenience is way less of an issue than dealing with an already mounted SMB share.
So yeah, MPV is a nonstarter.
you are way overthinking it my friend. running a docker container for jellyfin is not a big deal and requires virtually no maintenance. lots of QOL improvements too like tracking watched status, playlists, metadata, clients that run on an actual television, etc, etc.
The watched status is reason enough for me to use it. Having to remember what episode you watched last for 4+ shows at a time is annoying.
I’m still trying to figure out why I should stop running a jellyfin server. It does all this too, and I just had to deploy a docker container and point it at my NAS.
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This was painful to read. Yuck. It was written like clickbait. Like AI writes. Yuck.
And of course it was crossposted. If you've got something you need everyone to know, you gotta crosspost it everywhere.
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Reminds me of this HackerNews classic how you don't need Dropbox and all functionality can be replicated trivially using FTP.
Glad MPV works for you, shut up about the gatekeeping
I dailydrive a heavily configured MPV and I've got a lot of complaints about jellyfin, but this is a no-go for sharing for the vast majority of people.
MPV is great, I use it all the time. It's fully replaced VLC on my desktop.
It is not an "alternative to Jellyfin". It does not offer many "comfort features" like (synced ootb) watch tracking. It does not transcode at all, and it doesn't even run on devices that need transcoding most, like smart TVs.
These two applications fall into two different categories, and they will never replace each other. One is a media player, you throw mpv any video file, it puts it up on screen, great. The other is a media server, it allows you to sign in, browse your nicely organized library, and click play on the movie of your choice, very cool.
Even the idea of opening SMB or NFS to the entire internet just so your most technical of friends can manually download and watch a movie is insane compared to setting up Jellyfin. Reminder, not everyone has the connection to stream a full 4k bluray rip, transcoding allows those users to watch at all.
Besides,
Besides....
I'm going to assume you're unable to see the embedded image. I didn't add alt text, that's my mistake.
Below "Besides", there is a screenshot of a tweet by user @haydendevs stating "this is who you're arguing with online" and an attached image of a series of dots connected by lines. This is the (overused) visual representation of a "neural network" in machine learning. The meaning of the image in this context is to state you are arguing with bots or AI online. I used this twitter screenshot as an attempt to make a joke of the fact the OP reads like AI-generated text.
I will edit the alt text in my comment above.
The whole point of jellyfin/Plex is to provide a feature rich UI for your video files on your hard drive. This is walking back from that to the point that you may as well just use vlc and map network drives on windows. Heck, just carrying around a SSD full of videos is easier than this.
Yeah, I don't see how this is better than mounting the drive and using whatever I normally use.
My primary use for Jellyfin is:
- stream to TV - used to use minidlna, Jellyfin is a strict upgrade
- web page - mostly for my SO, who already has samba configured and doesn't use it
For YouTube, I just use NewPipe or Grayjay on mobile, and YouTube directly on web (uBlock blocks YT ads perfectly).
This looks cool, just not something I'd ever consider.
You know that mpv is what plex actually uses to play the content right? At least on desktop. A lot of my users (almost all actually) are watching things via the smart tv app or their phones/tablets etc. Watch states are tracked between them and for the most part it just works.
Who This Is For
- You're comfortable with terminal/config files
Aaand I'm out. It looked fun until I got to all the work I would need to do.
I'm comfortable with the terminal and messing around with config files.
I still rolled my eyes at how the user seem to have no understanding of what's the actual convenience that Plex/jellyfin provides. Hint: playing/streaming videos is the least of them.
Yup, I use the terminal every day at work, my workflow is VIM + tmux, and I self hosted a Minecraft server using systemd (and a bunch of other stuff), so CLIs are kinda my thing.
I don't use MPV. Why? I watch my content on my TV. If I'm on my computer where MPV could be used, I'll play video games or work on personal projects, not watch content. Jellyfin is easy enough that I had to block the app on my TV since my 3yo was watching it before I got up. It works really well, it's easy to set up, and even a child who can't read can use it.
What does MPV provide?
MPV lacks a graphical user interface so I have to keep the hotkey list open to use it. Normally I use VLC but it can't play some files right.
Edit the config to unbind all defaults, and define your own keybinds as you need them, using what's most intuitive for you. Helps building memory.
Or you can just use one if the plethora of guis...
Thanks. I installed SMPlayer for mouse control.
Celluloid is a nice take on an mpv GUI too.
I front-end mpv with smplayer.
It's enough for my purposes.
Nice! Now, this is absolutely a niche solution anyhow, but it's an option.
Glad you found your secret sauce!
So many wrong and misinformed comparisons....
So you just... run Samba and/or NFS over internet? That's pretty bad.
mpv nfs://nas.local/shows/season1/*
Fucking sick.
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