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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

I built a win7 HTPC about 6 or 7 years ago after not having used windows in AGES, and it blew my mind how awful it was finding codecs. Learning to avoid spyware and viruses really does require practice, and when you haven't spent the past decade visiting sketchy download sites, you really lose an eye for what's what.

I still recoil at the thought of being told "no, that's a container, not a codec!"

TBH, I'm still surprised at how awful some video stuff is. I've actually had about 5 false starts trying to make Plex work, and I'm trying it again (yeah, I never learn). Now the codecs and transcoding and stuff works on modern hardware, but it simply refuses to index content that you don't rename to please the master. It's absolutely insane. Software designed to make your life harder, not easier. There's a reason I just point Kodi to a NAS share. (speaking of awful configs.... but at least it plays!)

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Talking about codecs and splitters, LAV Filters covers pretty much everything. It packs libavcodec and libavformat as DirectShow filters.

https://github.com/Nevcairiel/LAVFilters

Before that, there was FFDShow. Things weren't as mature nor complete back then, though.

Huh. I find that interesting - for myself, Plex worked immediately, out of the box, was incredibly easy to use, and has held up like a tank. I’m watching a show off it right now at the moment; actually!

I just installed the Server on my MacBook or Windows laptop, installed the Plex channel on my Roku stick, added two folders, one for films and one for TV Shows, and I have never looked back.

Not saying your experience couldn’t have been the exact opposite - I’m just wondering what particular issues you ran into? Plex is solid af for me.

It's similar to this:

https://forums.plex.tv/t/need-help-for-organizing-naming-aut...

And the characteristic response from a Plex user:

>Well that is going to be a problem. Plex has a proper Naming Convention 2 that it expects you to follow. As This particular set of videos is not part of TheTVDB.com's database, Id recommend you reformat it to something plex is going to recognise.

That just doesn't make me happy. I get that the Plex use case is "indexing downloaded TV shows and movies", but I find it annoyingly prescriptive.

You can use "Fix Match" when Plex doesn't link up certain titles. I also find Plex incredibly easy and believe you have quite a big ask for identification in a free to use and very robust media management system. It's like complaining that self-checkout at the grocery store doesn't "just know" what groceries you are buying while refusing to scan any of the barcodes. Further, this is for an unlimited inventory of items and not limited by any boundary of supplier, shelf space, or category.

I've also added FileBot to my routine which improves organization of media, but Plex usually does well with unmodified naming.

So actually, my gripe is that Plex refuses to show the content at all. I'm looking at Fix Match and it looks it's for incorrect matches, not content it refuses to index.

I recognize the perils of asking for the moon and stars from free software. The issue is, they chose to make it insanely featureful at the expense of Just Working :)

I'm not afraid of work; I've spent days across local and containerized solutions for downloading, proxying, and outputting. It's possible to rename files in my download software, I estimate it at about 1h additional effort. However, the content I most often download is not yet available, so I'm not investing the time in generating those rules. So far I've been just playing with content that doesn't justify the time investment in creating rules. For example, often this content is uploaded by different people in different file formats. There's no one renaming catchall until you know specifically which sets you want to use.

I never asked for automatic categorization or metadata retrieval or album art or IMDB links, but it's forced on you by Plex :)

I'd tell you to check out Emby, but if ya can't figure out Plex...

Related: Sonarr, CouchPotato, etc

I would tell you both to check out Jellyfin, the Free Software continuation of Emby.

https://jellyfin.org/

Thanks for the insult.

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