Not at all. At least three or four people have said that PLEX has better features, but no one so far has said what features make it worth using or what makes it better. I found that Jellyfin was one of the easiest things to set up once I started my home server. I don’t have any background in tech or IT, I’m just a hobyist.

I went with Jellyfin when I was setting it up because it seemed easier and had a more active support community, but from looking at the two, they seemed basically interchangeable. I’ve never had a reason to look for something else, since Jellyfin works better than most of the corporate apps on my TV. It loads faster, has less lag, and is easier to navigate than Netflix, Disney, Prime, etc. My zero-tech family find it easy enough to use daily.

When I found out Plex charged, I thought that they were actually managing your remote storage or something. What is the market for people who want to pay to access their own files on their own hardware? I genuinely don’t get it. If you want to share it, out of your home network there is always Tailscale or the like.

I don’t get who this product is for in a universe where Jellyfin exists.

Not a lot you can do with phones unfortunately. You could set them up as basic fileservers using CopyParty or Syncthing. Don’t use it for anything critical - these are not backup solutions.

Set up Tailscale to access it outside your network.

I’ve been told that government auctions canbe a good source for cheap used PCs but I never had much luck there. I suspect that they get snatched up quickly and stripped for parts. Try eBay or Mercari?

I was using CLI exclusively for a year or so, but recently added DockMon and it’s helped with updates and at-a-glance management.

Thanks, this ended up being a good fit for me, too

So if I understand correctly, you open the app or web on your phone, and it controls what’s playing on the TV via the server?

Symfonium is really great, but the TV version doesn’t quite work —or didn’t as of my testing probably a year ago.

I have also stopped using GMS, which makes using paid apps more difficult.

One thing that I really enjoyed was the Android Auto mode, which was flawless.

I’d be interested in hearing about your lyrion setup. I haven’t really tried it but it looks like that could open a whole software ecosystem. Do you use a phone app to select/skip/cue tracks?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be controlled by the TV remote, but it does need to be controlled away from the server.

Calibre Web Automated is a completely different project. I am liking it so far.

Some people have also suggested Kavita.

It’s a Russian project, which some people are suspicious of because Russia has leveraged open source projects for less-than-honest purposes in the past.

It’s managed by a for-profit company to sell their server software, which is generally approached with a big grain of salt in the FOSS community.

They preference OOXML files rather than ODF files by default, which some users (notably the document foundation) consider the more poorly-defined open standard, which benefits Microsoft (who mostly developed the OOXML format). This is some complicated inside baseball and the fork does not seem to be swayed by it—they’ll continue to preference OOXML.

OnlyOffice has contribution practices which are sometimes hostile to the FOSS ethos. The maintainers are not as transparent as most projects, they generally prefer to fix issues in-house rather than collaborate with a broader community on pull requests.

I still use it. Here’s why: I don’t think it’s very good ethics to be suspicious of an entire nationality; the code is open, so what are you afraid of? I guess it’s possible to sneak something malicious into a binary blob, but that borders on paranoia. I’ve personally found the team to be very responsive on issues that I’ve brought up in terms of function and design. When I have brought up issues with the function or design, they have been good partners and been clear in their actions. YMMV

FOSS only thrives because of public-private partnerships; I believe we should reward companies that offer open source code, even when they may not comply with some grand FOSS philosophy. I don’t like purity tests.

OOXML has, for better or worse, become the global document standard. Instead of lamenting it, we should be working to make it the best we can.

Basically, OnlyOffice works for me in a number of ways that LibreOffice doesn’t. I’m not interested in server-based document sharing, but I am interested in good design and mobile support. This fork is only focused on the server software, so I won’t be switching at this time.

For anyone who is not familiar already:

Calibre is a desktop application that has some file hosting/syncing features.

Calibre-Web is a server software that uses the Calibre library files, but can operate independently after setup.

Calibre Web Automated is a server software based on Calibre-Web with an overhauled UI and many additional features including automated ingest, OIDC, KOsync, file conversion and fixing, and more.

I don’t personally use it so I don’t know if it depends on davx5, but you can add a CalDAV calendar directly in Etar settings.

I think I was actually thinking of KashCal, which works with or without DAVx5 by design.

Okay, I found it. I was looking in the wrong place and going in circles instead of clicking through the documentation one screen at a time. How embarrassing!

You are 100% right that it is spelled out very clearly. Thank you for the patience.

Thanks for looking into it. What URL did you enter in the server endpoint? Is it just the HA domain? Or is it another link that I have to get from HA? I’m sorry if this is a dumb question but I genuinely don’t know.

Possibly underrated: CopyParty. Its an entire fileserver in a little over 1 MB. You can host it on anything that runs python and the client can be anything with a browser. It’s unbelievably simple and efficient. If I knew self hosting was this easy I would have started sooner.

For an unbelievably simple WebDAV server, you may want to look into copyparty.

It depends on your needs, as it is not as full featured as some options out there, but it’s one Python file that you can just download and open. Boom. Fileserver.

For Android, you can use any of those on your server and DAVx5 on the phone. That makes it accessible to any calendar and contacts app systemwide. Some apps may also be able to connect directly, such as Etar.

Same. It’s pretty much my best behaved container.

I’ve also had pretty good testing with One Calendar, but in general I prefer open source apps unless the proprietary app offers unique benefits.

I do wish they would spin off the Calendar into a standalone app, but they haven’t shown any interest in moving that direction. I use it for email anyway so I don’t mind.