Holy shit… This is so incredibly out of touch… I can’t even…

The Basics That Blow Minds

Lol no… yt-dlp is a bit nifty, but everything else here is utterly expected of any media solution… Exactly zero minds were blown here…

No transcoding

Damn that sucks when the destination device isn’t capable of hardware decoding the media file, and too slow to software decode it… (also, you do know that you can just disable transcoding in Plex/Jellyfin, right?)

No server

SMB and NFS are both servers.

Send someone an SMB/NFS share to your media

Jesus, are you directly exposing SMB and NFS to the Internet? NFS is entirely unencrypted, and SMB has super scary vulnerabilities regularly…

Zero server maintenance

I really hope you are patching the OS, to avoid vulnerabilities in SMB and NFS which you are exposing to the Internet…

Plays literally any codec without setup

Sure, provided the device supports hardware decoding the codec or is fast enough to software decode it…

Works offline/online seamlessly

So does both Jellyfin and Plex (plex needs a one liner config change, though, to be fair)

cross-platform

How about TVs? How about Mobile?

Or just… teach them? play movie.mkv isn’t rocket science.

My mom has needed to call me and be guided over the phone 100% of the times that she has needed to scan a document… How do you think teaching her to navigate a file structure in a terminal is going to go?

My daughter still needs us to spell out the cheat codes for her The Sims game… Do you think she’ll remember the terminal commands.

If I forced any of my friends and family to use the command line to play media, they would just watch something else from a streaming service that actually offers some User Experience… Or do something else entirely.

write a simple script or just… remember what you watched?

Dunno… That seems like a hassle when it’s a built in feature in Plex/Jellyfin

It’s literally a config file. If you can set up Jellyfin, you can handle this.

No… It’s a config file per device, and SMB/NFS mounts per device. Now you need to handle syncing that config file, and any other user of the server will need their own config files…

… And what about other features…

• How do you browse metadata for your movies and series? I often like to read a summary about a movie to know a bit about what to expect. I also like being able to search for an actor, and see the cover art.
• How do you group your movies with the extra features for that movie?
• How do you stream your media to your TV?
• How do you easily fetch subtitles for a movie that didn’t come with any subtitles?
• When you are away from home on a heavily bandwidth constrained connection, how do you watch your nice high-quality movies?

Back when I lived alone, attaching my media drive directly to my desktop computer made perfect sense, it was the only screen I owned that I wanted to watch anything on… And I didn’t need to share anything with anyone… And I could easily use mpv or vlc to watch anything I want…

But now that other people are in the mix, and I like the convenience of using whichever screen I’m currently near, a simple network share + mpv falls so far short it isn’t even funny.