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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

Ha! I have the same question except for Kodi. Never could figure it out.

My use case(s) for Plex:

1. I have media on my HD. Plex organizes it, figures out what show/movie it is, gets relevant metadata, and remembers how much I've watched it.

2. I then watch it on my TV. I don't want to watch it on my PC.

3. It lets me watch said media when I'm away from home (e.g. from a hotel room when I'm traveling). This is critical for me and what got me on to Plex.

4. It lets me share media with other users.

5. DVR: I pick the shows I like, and it records them for me. This is critical for me as well.

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I keep my media organized well organized in a folder structure. I either watch it from my PC, or my TV (with Kodi).

I don't want it organized for me. I don't want to "search" for the show/movie that I want to watch. I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list. I don't like/want all the Database back-end stuff that gets done in plex/jellyfin (IMDB lookups, rotten tomatoes reviews, etc.)

I use Jellyfin for my kids shows. I use Kodi for my TV.

And the thing I despise the most, I dont' want to rename/restructure/reorganize 100TB of media just so JellyFin can auto-guess incorrectly the movie/tv show/season/episode.

All of the kids crap? Dumped into a single folder and Jellyfin guessed most of it. The stuff it got wrong, I don't care about.

My stuff, that's been carefully curated over years? Even if I just feed jellyFin the content 1 directory at a time, it can't get seasons/episodes straight.

I don't watch my media when I'm away from home. I don't share my media.

It sounds like Jellyfin is not for you. However:

> I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list.

Been a while since I used Jellyfin, but you can set Plex to show it in list view. I would be surprised if Jellyfin didn't have that capability.

I only have to curate maybe 1/200 shows or movies. Radarr/Sonarr do that for me, and very well. Filebot works out that 1/200 for me, I just have a folder I dump to, and a containerised version sees it and fixes it.

I spent many hours previously curating, but as a human it's very inefficient when IMDB, TheTVDB, etc all have the info you need and can almost always get it right.

I think Kodi covers 1 and 2. Maybe Plex is slightly better at connecting to stuff like Chromecast / Smart TV? Those kind of walled devices aren't to my taste so I haven't tried them, well that and they didn't exist when I set things up.

Do you use Plex as a client in all cases?

There's a decent chance I just don't get it because I'm excessively particular in how I want things set up. Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me. As is granting a third party access to files on my local network. So I've built my own solutions for pretty much any feature Plex has, except possibly user friendliness (which is the most likely reason I may use jellyfin, but not for personal use).

> Do you use Plex as a client in all cases?

I use Plex on my Roku so I can watch my media on my TV instead of on a monitor. Occasionally (pretty rarely), I use it on my Android for the same reason.

And I take the Roku with me whenever I travel so I can watch things wherever I go.

> Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me.

I don't use Plex to play videos on my PC. The experience is better on my TV, so I don't consume entertainment media via my monitor. To watch random video files on my PC, I use mplayer.

So how do you watch the media on your PC remotely?

> So how do you watch the media on your PC remotely?

For stuff I'm planning to watch on my PC I just let sonarr/radarr import the files directly to my PC.

For stuff I want to view elsewhere I have a NAS and a raspberry pi with wireguard configured to make a VPN I can use to access my local network.

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