Hacker News Reader

Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

> but will probably move off of that as they continue to poison the product.

Check out Emby. Very similar to Plex (it's either an early fork or another XBMC offspring or both). I moved away from Plex because of there being persistent bugs and QoL issues that remained unfixed, but they started doing bullshit like VR apps etc. Emby seems to be laser focused on being a very good self-hosted media server + client, and nothing more. I'm a happy paying customer.

View on HN

Emby has upset many people in the past, with their move from open source to proprietary. Jellyfin is a fork of emby that is still foss.

Recently switched off Emby to Jellyfin - having a permanent "buy premium!" in the player (auto search subtitles) sucked.

I'm very happy with Jellyfin. I built my entire collection in it.

Subtitles were mostly not working for me in Jellyfin, which makes it not very usable as a Plex replacement for us (Android TV client).

I wasn't overly pleased with the seeking either, but I could definitely live with that if subs worked, as the rest was quite nice indeed.

Yeah, seeking is still a bit flaky. But subtitles work great for me, at least when using the Web and Roku clients. I got a better experience in some corner cases on the Roku client by making sure that the filenames ended with ".en.srt" so Jellyfin correctly associates them with the English language.

Ah, my subs are mostly embedded, IIRC that's what Jellyfin has issues with.

Embedded subs worked for me in Android TV after going into the app's settings and changing the "Preferred media player" to "LibVLC (experimental)".

The joys of open source. If one day they want to close up, someone else can continue on what was open. Nice to have an evactuation plan built-in to such services in case things go rouge or the devs simply need to make decisions for themselves over the customer.

That's not such a big deciding factor for me, and I am happy to pay for Emby. When I evaluated my move off Plex, Jellyfin was not nearly as refined as I would have liked.

I might give Jellyfin a go at some point. Since they all are children of XBMC, I assume that the metadata format is the same, meaning all my thumbnails, posters, trailers, subtitles and so on can stay in the filesystem next to the media and it'll "just work" with Jellyfin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com