For those looking for alternatives, I would only suggest Plex if you’re OK with hitching your wagon to a different company with interests possibly competing with your own. Its great software and easy to set up but they can remove features you like and use at any time. It may be a risk worth taking for you but go into it with eyes open. I dropped them when they removed photo sync and started getting more aggressive about their content offerings.
Jellyfin is my current home and I like it a lot but I recognize that not everyone wants to deal with the setup and troubleshooting.
For some middle ground, there’s also Emby which is a commercial version of Jellyfin.
I like Jellyfin but I do not like the way it shitted up my media directories. I have them meticulously sorted. I don’t want images and database shit in them. I much prefer how Plex keeps its database and metadata separated and in its own directory. I would otherwise love to switch.
You should use jellyfin in docker and mount your media files without write permissions. It’s exactly what I do partially for this but more to ease maintenance and reproducing my server.
My media box runs Windows 10 but I’ll be converting it to Linux eventually. My main PC is Linux but I am a newbie. If you could, tell me what docker is.
Docker is a container framework. Basically a recipe for a piece of software or a service. All you have to do is download a docker container image (there’s numerous one pre prepared for stuff like qbittorrent or sonarr or jellyfin) and you need to mount (basically reference) your media or configuration directories into the container. By default each container is basically it’s own self contained os (like a vm, but much more efficient). This prevents services from stepping over each other and aids composability because if you’re interested in something new like bazarr literally all you have to do is pull an image and configure it. There’s also something called docker-compose which let’s you put all that configuration for your services into a readable yaml file and then you can just move it from machine to machine to setup or transition.
Note. You can use docker on windows but it’s much more efficient on actual Linux. Windows just runs a pseudo Linux VM for docker support. The real thing is always better.
For those looking for alternatives, I would only suggest Plex if you’re OK with hitching your wagon to a different company with interests possibly competing with your own. Its great software and easy to set up but they can remove features you like and use at any time. It may be a risk worth taking for you but go into it with eyes open. I dropped them when they removed photo sync and started getting more aggressive about their content offerings.
Jellyfin is my current home and I like it a lot but I recognize that not everyone wants to deal with the setup and troubleshooting.
For some middle ground, there’s also Emby which is a commercial version of Jellyfin.
I like Jellyfin but I do not like the way it shitted up my media directories. I have them meticulously sorted. I don’t want images and database shit in them. I much prefer how Plex keeps its database and metadata separated and in its own directory. I would otherwise love to switch.
You should use jellyfin in docker and mount your media files without write permissions. It’s exactly what I do partially for this but more to ease maintenance and reproducing my server.
My media box runs Windows 10 but I’ll be converting it to Linux eventually. My main PC is Linux but I am a newbie. If you could, tell me what docker is.
Docker is a container framework. Basically a recipe for a piece of software or a service. All you have to do is download a docker container image (there’s numerous one pre prepared for stuff like qbittorrent or sonarr or jellyfin) and you need to mount (basically reference) your media or configuration directories into the container. By default each container is basically it’s own self contained os (like a vm, but much more efficient). This prevents services from stepping over each other and aids composability because if you’re interested in something new like bazarr literally all you have to do is pull an image and configure it. There’s also something called docker-compose which let’s you put all that configuration for your services into a readable yaml file and then you can just move it from machine to machine to setup or transition.
Note. You can use docker on windows but it’s much more efficient on actual Linux. Windows just runs a pseudo Linux VM for docker support. The real thing is always better.
+1 for Jellyfin. GPL licensed software so nice.