Kodi/XBMC has been providing that for like 20 years though…
What jellyfin does provide that Kodi doesn’t is on the fly transcoding for watching on mobile device and remote access. If you don’t need that, Kodi might be a better choice providing a far wider array of features.
You’re not wrong but there are still drawbacks to Kodi where Jellyfin ends up being better. In my use case, with 5 tvs in the house, 2 are hooked up to Nvidia shield tvs but the other 3 are Chromecast w/ Google TV which have very limited storage unless I want to spend a fortune in hubs for each one to add a USB drive or micro SD.
With kodi installed I would regularly hit the storage limit of the device and have all kinds of weird bugs. Just as an example I had my daughter set up with a kids only account, but account switching would cause Kodi to become unresponsive for anywhere from 30 seconds to having to do a hard reset of the device. Jellyfin gives me the same access to my library with a lighter, more streamlined, persistent interface across devices and with easy and fast profiles. It still allows me to keep a pi as the host so the whole setup is low power (important for me as we’re on solar, every watt helps!)
I don’t really need the Kodi plugins I used to have if the main purpose of streaming my local content isn’t smooth and simple for the family. This is coming from a long time XBMC user, I’ve been running it since my original modded Xbox in the early 2000s.
Then you are doing it wrong. I have three instances of Kodi, one of them on completely hard drive less machine booted via PXE, the other two are Pis with minimal is on an SD card. All the media’s are stored on a NAS, and all the metadata is shared between the instances on MySQL, all of it (profiles, views, etc) shared across all the instances.,
“Wrong,” or a matter of preference and willingness to sink time into the project. Your setup sounds great, but it’s also easy enough for me to do a simple apk install for Jellyfin and host it on the pi that already has my network shares vs spending the time setting up a database and a local DHCP server etc. etc. Netboot is great but with a fraction of the setup with Jellyfin my needs were met, which was my original point. Also how many end users will take this route? Realistically not many.
Don’t get me wrong this was something i’d totally be into a decade ago so I get where you’re coming from, love the idea of having the metadata and everything scraped centralized, but what I have works and it’s easyyyyyyyy 🤷♂️
I just recently set up jellyfin as a way for my family to access the stored media outside of my house. Our current Networking setup doesn’t play nicely with VPNs so this was an easy way to do that.
A slick interface with nice title cards and pictures, feels like your own personal streaming service with no drawback
Kodi/XBMC has been providing that for like 20 years though…
What jellyfin does provide that Kodi doesn’t is on the fly transcoding for watching on mobile device and remote access. If you don’t need that, Kodi might be a better choice providing a far wider array of features.
Personally I prefer jellyfins interface. Plus its easy for my bon tech familyyto use jellyfin
That’s fine, but it still doesn’t do a tenth of what Kodi can do.
I also don’t really see how it’s easier in terms of browsing. It’s a list of movies and tv shows…
You’re not wrong but there are still drawbacks to Kodi where Jellyfin ends up being better. In my use case, with 5 tvs in the house, 2 are hooked up to Nvidia shield tvs but the other 3 are Chromecast w/ Google TV which have very limited storage unless I want to spend a fortune in hubs for each one to add a USB drive or micro SD.
With kodi installed I would regularly hit the storage limit of the device and have all kinds of weird bugs. Just as an example I had my daughter set up with a kids only account, but account switching would cause Kodi to become unresponsive for anywhere from 30 seconds to having to do a hard reset of the device. Jellyfin gives me the same access to my library with a lighter, more streamlined, persistent interface across devices and with easy and fast profiles. It still allows me to keep a pi as the host so the whole setup is low power (important for me as we’re on solar, every watt helps!)
I don’t really need the Kodi plugins I used to have if the main purpose of streaming my local content isn’t smooth and simple for the family. This is coming from a long time XBMC user, I’ve been running it since my original modded Xbox in the early 2000s.
Then you are doing it wrong. I have three instances of Kodi, one of them on completely hard drive less machine booted via PXE, the other two are Pis with minimal is on an SD card. All the media’s are stored on a NAS, and all the metadata is shared between the instances on MySQL, all of it (profiles, views, etc) shared across all the instances.,
“Wrong,” or a matter of preference and willingness to sink time into the project. Your setup sounds great, but it’s also easy enough for me to do a simple apk install for Jellyfin and host it on the pi that already has my network shares vs spending the time setting up a database and a local DHCP server etc. etc. Netboot is great but with a fraction of the setup with Jellyfin my needs were met, which was my original point. Also how many end users will take this route? Realistically not many.
Don’t get me wrong this was something i’d totally be into a decade ago so I get where you’re coming from, love the idea of having the metadata and everything scraped centralized, but what I have works and it’s easyyyyyyyy 🤷♂️
I just recently set up jellyfin as a way for my family to access the stored media outside of my house. Our current Networking setup doesn’t play nicely with VPNs so this was an easy way to do that.