Home Media Server General (Plex,Kodi,Emby,Jellyfin, etc)

[#lurker]

Plex has been giving me a headache recently. Every now and then the client will not find the server, and it will takes several tries of clicking "retry" to get it to work. I've tried so many combination of plex settings, server settings, router settings, etc. that I'm lost.
In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal, but it's really annoying and probably indicative of the other issues I've also been having. Anyone got ideas?

 

[oh no its pipkun]

is trans coding even necessary because almost everything plays everything. before you needed it because players did not play every format so you had to transcode to a format the player can play now they almost play everything. i have not seen that problem in a long time.

your device's upload/download rate may require transcoding.

Plex has been giving me a headache recently. Every now and then the client will not find the server, and it will takes several tries of clicking "retry" to get it to work. I've tried so many combination of plex settings, server settings, router settings, etc. that I'm lost.
In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal, but it's really annoying and probably indicative of the other issues I've also been having. Anyone got ideas?

ive had the same problem with different devices and seemingly different causes. ultimately changing the port number of the server fixed most of it. i still have to click retry on my phone and laptop but that seems to be nordvpn and mullvad servers sucking dick lately. it does happen even with the "invisible on LAN" option is set to off on phone.

 

[#lurker]

ive had the same problem with different devices and seemingly different causes. ultimately changing the port number of the server fixed most of it. i still have to click retry on my phone and laptop but that seems to be nordvpn and mullvad servers sucking dick lately. it does happen even with the "invisible on LAN" option is set to off on phone.

Cheers for this, this gives me a few ideas. Will try them and see if it helps.

 

[rbzfan]

Plex is what I use and just based on my experiences with it, I'm fairly pleased. I bought the lifetime pass back before they raised the prices. You do need good hardware like an Nvidia Shield or an XBOX to get the program to work well for playback on a television though, so switching over isn't a very cheap option. However, once you put the money down and just start paying monthly or yearly for a VPN, it's life changing. I don't have any other streaming services and I get to watch whatever the fuck I want. Their UI is nice because it is intuitive and customizable, I don't feel like I'm using bootleg or pirate software. Making it look semi-professional as the Plex team has done bridges the gap between pirating and using a real platform. I also use Ultra.cc seedbox because of the tools they offer, including synchonization for downloads, so I can grab any movie instantly and have it show up on my profile, taking away any technical setback.

 

[rbzfan]

Spoiler: Fan Edit List (it's long)

One collection that I am very proud I was able to put together, using a couple different guides, was one for all the fan edits I've ever come across I found interesting. Of course these personal media sites can be used for anything, but being able to host alternate versions of movies that are more preferrable to their original theatrical or studio released iterations is my biggest reason for switching to alternative platforming. I can make the rules what appears on my service and provide some better versions for movies. Using the Plex tools to auto-generate a collection based on meta tags and "Edition" tags, I built the collection based on any file I tagged with "fan edit," and then I had to go through each movie one-by-one and add all the metadata for the edit, including any provided posters, editor's descriptions, and the new names. These all still show up alongside my regular movies if I'm just looking through my whole catalog.

 

[Jewish Fantasy Race]

I've been self-hosting my media for a couple of years now (jellyfin), and while that's fine and good for when you incidentally want to watch a movie, I've honestly found that hosting music is more trouble than it's worth and just bring a HiFi music player with me instead. Sometimes tech regression is tech improvement.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

for anyone else who was suckered into the apple ecosystem, Infuse is a vlc-like that also works as a frontend for plex. i had to get it because plex cant handle certain 4k hdr files or dolby vision. the apple tv 4k can natively play the files so infuse allows direct playback. you can also set up a media share and it'll do the same thing without the htpc stuff.

its a paid app for the 4k and dolby vision playback. 12.99 a month (year) or 100 for lifetime. 1080p is free.

the paid version also has a bare bonez ai upscaler which works ok since its limited by the a15 chip. allegedly, the new appletv coming out this year will have a full featured upscaler.

i had to get it because plex was transcoding 4k files the appletv can play natively. noticeably washed out hdr colors.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Does infuse require a subscription to stream your own shit on your own network?

 

[oh no its pipkun]

Does infuse require a subscription to stream your own shit on your own network?

it's got a free version but youre limited to 1080p and non dolby atmos/vision.

 

[Neodanthril]

so ive been using emby premium (lifetime purchase) for a year or so now and here are my thoughts about it for anyone looking around for something other than plex. my intended use case for it is to play all my media files at home to my main tv over lan, and on my phone on the go over the interwebz.

emby is very much a jack of all trades, master of none. while it can host audiobooks, podcasts, books, music, tv, movies, webtv, and probably some other stuff, it is very much more geared for movies and tv. it has a really hard time resuming playback on audio files, when you arent starting at the beginning, usually failing indefinitely. this is a minor problem for music as you can just start the track over, but for a six hour audiobook its really annoying to have to remember where you were and scan back to where you left off. probably the best way to use it for audiobooks for phone use would be to use the media server to download the audiobook to your device from the server and then listen to it locally with a different app. coincidentally this is also the only way you can use emby for books as it cant read book files, only host them. i think one day they plan on adding a bookreader but idk. it can and does automatically parse files and populate metadata on the server side without touching the file, and it does a pretty good job. however it doesnt do great with dvd rips with extras, but that isnt really embys fault as there is no website that is set up to detect that and or even have a file for it. that emby insists that one of my movies is some old japaneese horror movie and doesnt want to accept my changing it to the right metadata is entirely on emby.
lastly there are some super high quality videos that emby doesnt seem to be able to process normally and will stutter the frames terribly. im not versed enough in video codec shit to isolate what format it doesnt like but be aware of that if you like 70 gb versions of movies.

 

[Troon Meet Noose]

Is there a good way to replicate the Spotify experience with a home media server? By that I don't mean the enormous music library, but to be able to steam music on your phone from the server wherever you are in an intuitive manner?

 

[Civilian 18]

Is there a good way to replicate the Spotify experience with a home media server? By that I don't mean the enormous music library, but to be able to steam music on your phone from the server wherever you are in an intuitive manner?

Jellyfin has a music library category, and there are multiple clients that are specifically for music and audio streaming.
So then it would just be securely exposing your ass to the world for access everywhere.

 

[Neodanthril]

Just discovered it is a known issue and hasbeen for years that emby is terrible at iptv playback. So if you want to watch iptv be it a publicly available one or your own custom one, emby will not do it and doesn't seem like that will change anytime soon

 

[oh no its pipkun]

Just discovered it is a known issue and hasbeen for years that emby is terrible at iptv playback. So if you want to watch iptv be it a publicly available one or your own custom one, emby will not do it and doesn't seem like that will change anytime soon

emby turned to shit. the connect anywhere feature hasn't worked in a few years for me. so i stick with plex and 3rd party apps that can do native playback that plex decides to transcode for some reason. the emby/jellyfish ui is great. being able to fix metadata on the app is very useful and it played the tv episodes in the right order; specials were played in the right episode order as opposed to at the end or beginining because of the the specials designation. plex finally caught up like a year or two ago.

Is there a good way to replicate the Spotify experience with a home media server? By that I don't mean the enormous music library, but to be able to steam music on your phone from the server wherever you are in an intuitive manner?

plex, kodi, emby, jellyfin can all play back music/audio books. as the post above showed, resuming playback at the last position can be spotty. jellyfin and kodi are free but require extra steps for remote playback. plex is the easiest but comes at a pretty high cost for new adopters. emby is the worst now i'd avoid it.

 

[Neodanthril]

upon further investigation the problem i was experiencing is not unique to emby and it turns out running your own iptv channel is just shit regardless of how you serve it. i will praise emby and say i can at least get third party iptv channels to work at all with a plugin, and i cannot say the same about jellyfin. vlc also can do it right out of the box. i am willing to concede i may just be retarded though and that both emby and jellyfin can run thrid party free iptv channels out of the box and i am doing something wrong.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

upon further investigation the problem i was experiencing is not unique to emby and it turns out running your own iptv channel is just shit regardless of how you serve it. i will praise emby and say i can at least get third party iptv channels to work at all with a plugin, and i cannot say the same about jellyfin. vlc also can do it right out of the box. i am willing to concede i may just be retarded though and that both emby and jellyfin can run thrid party free iptv channels out of the box and i am doing something wrong.

jellyfin is an open source fork of emby, so the plugins should work.

 

[Betonhaus]

jellyfin is an open source fork of emby, so the plugins should work.

They probably have diverged in unpredictable ways. Jellyfin was forked when Emby became closed source and behind a paywall, and since then Emby has continued to improve because they have paid developers on staff while Jellyfin has lagged behind - and if I recall correctly Jellyfin had to spend a year doing but fixes because they were rushing to slap on new features as fast as possible.

But yeah IPTV is shit. I got my hopes up but I only got a small fraction of the available channels to work and that was after spending a lot of time trying to weed out foreign language ones and setting up the schedule was a royal pain and doesn't work for most channels.

I did experiment with a plugin that lets you generate a tv channel using your own media and that was cool, but unnecessary for me.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

Kodi was the media server people used for iptv back the day. don't know how it works now.

 

[bifftango]

Kodi was the media server people used for iptv back the day. don't know how it works now.

Kodi can do IPTV okay, but if you have a large playlist, it can't handle it.

Tivimate, both on Android boxes and emulated on the PC, is the way to go now for the best experience, but it costs some money and the limit is five devices per subscription. Its weak point is VOD, though, so if you must have the VOD, its best to use something like IPTV Smarters or something similar. The live TV function on Smarters is kind of janky, though.

For Linux, there's Nodecast-TV, which is essentially proxied server. You just load it up in your browser. It's still in its infancy, though, and the developer seems too busy to update it, so it's not quite there yet.

 

[autosarcophagy]

Kodi can do IPTV okay, but if you have a large playlist, it can't handle it.

Tivimate, both on Android boxes and emulated on the PC, is the way to go now for the best experience, but it costs some money and the limit is five devices per subscription. Its weak point is VOD, though, so if you must have the VOD, its best to use something like IPTV Smarters or something similar. The live TV function on Smarters is kind of janky, though.

For Linux, there's Nodecast-TV, which is essentially proxied server. You just load it up in your browser. It's still in its infancy, though, and the developer seems too busy to update it, so it's not quite there yet.

would this not be dependent on what you install Kodi on like on some android box or a mini pc some some small single-board computer or a normal computer. and the spec all of these have