The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over.

I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.

If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.

If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.

> "Usually i remember what i was watching"

You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.

Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.

I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.

Plus the whole *arr stack.

Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.

Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.

I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing.

Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.

Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper

There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.

It does. Has for a while.

Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't.

And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.

Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.

Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.

It means access from anywhere.

Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.

You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.

You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.

To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).

So on vacation you just come to the hotel room and fall on the bed. First thing you do when you wake up is leave the room?

Seems like you don't need hotels, a hostel would work just fine :D

Some of us need to unwind even on "vacation". Just get your feet up and watch your shows and relax before hitting the sack.

What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??

How are you going about installing Jellyfin on random hotel TVs? None of the hotels I've stayed at have that level of freedom on their TVs.

(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)

If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.

However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.

The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.

Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.

Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.

> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.

After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.

The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.

If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.

In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.

If you want it accessible outside your house, the two most common options are NGINX + LetsEncrypt or Tailscale.

(or you make your peace with sending your login details in cleartext)