I only recently set up a Plex server to share movies and TV with friends. It was a painless setup process. I have all my media in the same downloads folder, and Plex was pretty good at parsing which things were movies and which were TV. A few things confused it (one web based TV series showed up as 13 different movies for example) but overall very good results.

Then the news broke about Plex sharing people’s porn viewing habits and even though I am not sharing any in my server, I had second thoughts. I’m not much of a power user these days but I do care about digital privacy and take measures to protect it, so I found jellyfin and gave it a shot.

The media detection is embarrassingly bad. It cannot tell the difference between movies and TV at all. The movie aliens was identified as the TV show ancient aliens. The Barbie movie was identified as some direct to streaming kids show. And so on.

The only solution I’ve found digging around in the app is to edit the metadata of every file that it got wrong. It’s time consuming and frustrating. I would prefer to just have a bare bones directory structure but I cannot find any way to make it work that way. Even just the ability to remove files from a category would be good enough but all I can seem to do is delete the media entirely.

I would prefer not to reorganize my directory structure into distinct categories of movies and TV because it is also where I seed my torrents. Is there a convenient way around this? Is this purely a skill issue? Am I dumb?

I have been getting drawn back into the FOSS world with the growing trend of enshittification but my hazy memories of horrible UX and endless annoying tweaks and workarounds from the brief time I switched to Linux (over 15 years ago at this point) are resurfacing and I’m recalling why I gave up on it back then. Furthermore my friends with whom I’m trying to share things are less tech savvy than me and I dread having to troubleshoot their Roku apps remotely. Should I just give it up and stick to Plex or is there a way around all of this that doesn’t require annoying micromanagement?