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What's the home media server landscape look like these days? I used Kodi about 10 years ago I think, but I hardly ever hear about it on HN, just Plex and I think Jellyfin? Why would someone choose one over the others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kodi is still an excellent option if you have it directly serve media from connected storage or a NFS/SMB share. Some people just don’t have the need to “share” their collection, which makes running a media server unnecessary. I believe some use Kodi as a direct play frontend for a media server. But the native apps are pretty good these days and can direct play ~everything. The other strong point is the plugin ecosys…
I use Kodi on a Shield to play any local files I want to watch, which reside on a USB-attached SSD. Results have been pretty good, although it suffers from some non-intuitive UI design... the sort of which also plagues other media applications I've tried. Let me try it on my computer... OK, specifically, Kodi says, "your library is currently empty. To populate it... enter "Files" section, add a media source, and conf…
I think right mouse click is "back" by default. Everything is configurable to a huge extent as well if you don't like the defaults.
What's the home media server landscape look like these days? I used Kodi about 10 years ago I think, but I hardly ever hear about it on HN, just Plex and I think Jellyfin? Why would someone choose one over the others?
They're all different things. Kodi, as you may recall from a decade ago, has its roots in the old Xbox Media Center. It grew beyond that OG Xbox a long time ago and runs on just about anything these days, although things like Raspberry Pi 4s are a common (and performant) choice for dedicated hardware. It is open source. Kodi is primarily a media player (load files from local or regular-ass SMB NAS, and play them), an…
little correction: Jellyfin exists because neither Plex nor Emby are free or open.