So you want a media server? And everyone says you should be using Jellyfin, Emby, or Plex. But why? I show you a simpler approach, that’s free and easy to do.
I also have it written out on my blog to make it even easier:

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43 COMMENTS

  6. The issue is Kodi is too customizable for a beginner. Plex is much easier to me for setting up. I wanted to use Kodi, believe me, but it just never seemed to work right, and no one on any kodi forum would help me out in changing the UI. I just good 'noob' comments and told to 'use google.' Plex folks have been much nicer to me in helping get that set up.

  7. Yea this is dumb, you need to have a device that actually has Kodi as you can’t just run a web ui kodi instance, if you could it kinda defeats the purpose too, jellyfin can be pulled out anywhere to watch anything you have at any time, especially my setup is good for this as I can torrent and watch all remotely with webui and ssh

  10. Lord, kodi was great like pre-2010 but we have much better options now. I remember fighting to get movies to play, hunting through all the different audio codecs trying to find one that worked and then having to teach my parents how to use it. What a mess. Thank god for Plex and Jellyfin.

  12. Some guys like to live complicated lives. I have started to use Zidoo media player and it does it all. Just feed it your files and it takes care of everything else. I don't care about cross device streaming but if I had to stream 4K rips, I would use SMB / NFS / http as you said. To each their own though. Whatever floats their boat.

  14. I used this setup back around 2016. Plex is so much nicer for a user-friendly way of organizing everything and sharing it with family members. It also crashes a lot less than Kodi, that's the main reason I switched. Jellyfin is almost as good, except for the lack of a built-in end user registration system.

  17. I have Kodi streaming from my NAS's Samba share. I briefly had Jellyfin before I had to do a clean reinstall of the NAS OS and now Jellyfin won't install due to dependency issues.

    I want Jellyfin back for the backend. I like Kodi's UI better on Android TV, but managing my library is so much easier with Jellyfin.

  19. Kodi was amazing back in the day. And it's still great today. However, Plex and it's alternatives is so feature rich out of the box, they now run circles around Kodi if you're looking for an all in one experience. Plex offers skip opening and end credits, auto play next, account based scrobbing and playback history, etc. right out of the gate. Also, when you add friends or family who are not so tech savvy, they just have to install the plex client and once logged in, they can start to enjoy your library without any extra configuration.

    Kodi is great if you like to tinker and watch your library on your own using one or two devices. But once you start sharing your media libabry, it doesn't scale as easily as it's competition whereas Plex can almost be an equivalent to any other of the major stream platforms out there such as D+, ATV, HBO Max, etc.

  25. I don't trust Kodi for this, it's always been too unstable for me.
    Back in the day I would just enable my upnp server and put files there. This is all I need to be able play videos in my phone or my TV. But the thing about Plex is that my parents can use it. Also true with emby although not that well.

    No one is using Plex to just play videos on their devices. Plex is for sharing your library with users that are used to just browsing netflix or youtube. Plex is the best tool at that job and it's not even that good at it. But if I told my parents to use kodi, my library would never see any use.

  28. So can u eli5 why I need to do ol this? I installed Kodi backing the days and Jellyfin today (both reccs by LTT)
    But I don't understand the need outside of the Webui and everything lookin pretty.
    I generally use Windows SMB on my laptop and CX file explorer to browse everything.

    My client side aka smartphone is prolly more powerful than the laptop. I don't think it drops any frames even on 4k60fps and I play the files on VLC player.

    Is there something I'm missing?

  37. My library consists of a range of different containers and codecs from MKV, AVI, MP4, etc, with MP3, AAC, AC3, EAC3, DTS, DTS-HD, DolbyTrueHD, Dolby Atmos, DTS-X, etc and most of which of my library is archived in RAR files. Before having a Smart TV i utilized either Peppermint linux server box to host my files and mainly used Kodi, VLC, MPC:HT on a PC with HDMI connection to my AV receiver or a RaspPI via LibreElec over HDMI configured with passthrough Dolby, DTS and their HD successors to the receiver and also AAC to DD. I recently changed to a Fire TV and been having trouble getting a media player that can do all that as well as access the video in the archives

  41. With Jellyfin my kids and family can search for movies that aren’t in the library yet and request them and they automatically download and add to the library, move to the correct location etc etc. this would work for a very simplistic setup but you’re kind of limited.

  42. Sorry, you are missing the point of media players. Not saying that any of the Plex, Jellyfish, etc are perfect but what you have is basically just localhost file playing. A proper media streaming setup has a centralized library, you can continue watching on other devices, etc. etc. Besides that, the video is fairly unstructured. The steps are fairly clear but made unnecessarily complicated. Sorry.. not really impressed

  43. I prefer plex. I have a heater in my house that used to be an actual server in a data center. I enjoyed setting up a homelab and playing with a bunch of stuff. As with many homelabs, Plex is the most widely used package on my lab because my friends and family all connect to it and stream. Kodi looks cool because it can do the emulator thing but I don't think they charge $3 a month like plex. I'd like to try hosting Kodi this way, I was disappointed that it was not like Plex or Jellyfin. Or at least that's the impression I got, it looked like it was for local use as opposed to being intended to be used as a personal streamer that others can use remotely.

    If this works, I'll be able to share the ability to play emulators through Kodi. I've been having a hard time finding anything that is easy to setup that would work like Plex for retro video games