A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I recently started using Kodi for my linux distro collection, but some videos look terrible in comparison to when played in VLC. See attached picture with screengrabs from VLC and Kodi of the same frame in an MKV 1080p h.265 file. What could be the issue? I didn't change any video settings in either
Don't get the hate for kodi, nor the massive boner that the selfhosted communities here and on reddit have for plex. And how can you compare vlc it's a fifteenth kind of software.
Anyway i won't even downvote, im curious what's the problem with kodi? some of us have been using it for probably 15 years, i have hit a million bugs over the years but never noticed it was unusable? Always used it on some sort of Linux.
Well, if you ask me whether it's working? Or can it be used? Yes! It does work and can be used.
But it's like using 2010 smartphone in 2023. It does work, but personally I have zero joy using it.
Kodi is slow, laggy software. Default interface looks ugly. Especially animations - they are laggy and super ugly. Whole interface lags when navigating. As a cherry on top - settings are super non-intuitive and very hard to use. Last few times I used - addons are tend to fail to install or fail to work without bugs, app itself crashed few times (on both Android and Linux). Generally what is the most significant issue with it is it's utter slow performance and UI/UX (ugly/laggy animations, annoying non-synced menu sounds, annoying interface which is very hard to navigate and use).
For example, Jellyfin client is like day & night difference. Settings are easy to use, interface is neat, not laggy and so on.
It's interesting but I've not had any performance issues running Kodi on anything from a fire tv to a Chromecast to windows to Linux (Ubuntu). I don't run a ton of plugins but the ones I do work almost flawlessly most of the time.
I will say that a couple of years ago I moved to using the jf server connected to Kodi and that seems to be the best of every world. I get the Kodi interface (jf didn't have themes and it is still really unintuitive to me) and I get a single repository for my multiple clients.
All of this is to say that perhaps Kodi isn't as bad as you think it is just because you had some issues with your install.
I use Kodi for the Google drive add on to stream and nothing else. So I keep it as bare bones as possible.
I also don't get why Plex is being upvoted at all on lemmy because usually anyzhing not remotely (F)OSS is immediately shut down and replaced with a Foss alternative.
Think about Excel use cases -> Instantly asked to also support Libre/OO Calc.
So why is Plex still considered over Jellyfin when the feature parity is almost equal to Plex.
Because it’s not. I say this as somebody who would love to go all in on Jellyfin
What's missing? I switched to jellyfin over a year ago now and it's just been better
Jellyfin has:
A dedicated music app?
Music filtering/smart playlists? Sonic analysis?
Good 4k/x265 performance?
Has a third party (or built in) utility that shows me streaming usage per person?
Allows me to limit remote users to streaming from a single IP address at a time?
Let’s me watch something together with another remote user?
Has an app for most any device (like Plex or Emby) that does NOT require sideloading?
Has built in native DVR steaming/recording support?
Dedicated music app: Not 1st party. But there are projects like Finamp and Gelli
Music filtering? Not that I am aware of. Just basic functionality
Sonic analysis? No. Sounds like a very specific use case
4k amd/or 265.h performance? You mean transcoding? If yes: Just as much as ffmpeg can utilize your GPU.
Utility to see usage per person? Nope. Basic usage stats though
Limit remote user? No. But That can be probably coded if theres enough demand.
Watch Together? Yep. But never had a reason to try it so YMMV
Has an app? The 1st party on is on anything that has Android on it (Android mobile and TV)
Native DVR? Yes but I can't really gauge how good it works.
Ok
That’s something people use fairly frequently (generate a music playlist from all albums with “Christmas” in the title)
It’s not; I’m guessing you don’t know what it is so hand waved it away as something people don’t use.
Nope; how is the 4k and x265 playback experience.
That’s not great.
I have that with a 3rd party utility with Plex.
Great
What about Samsung TVs? Roku? AppleTV? Firestick? TIZEN?
Jellyfin does have watch party support now, though it's currently in beta
Streaming usage per person is available via one of the stats plugins, but it is admittedly crude and missing some info (such as bandwidth used).
I'm using the android app without issues, which didn't require side loading, but my experience with other platforms is zero.
Jellyfin is great but it's nowhere near feature parity with plex. I run them side by side. Jellyfin for my personal local playback and plex for everything else.
I'll switch over eventually but for now, for someone with over 110tb of content and over a dozen remote streaming clients there is nothing better than plex.
It's been trash previously, but became fully usable in the past 2 years or so. Still has a lot of playback issues, but works in most cases.
It's because despite all of its issues it still mostly just works and is very good.
I think it's because Jellyfin still needs some polish.
It's getting better every day, though. I run both in parallel and usually use Jellyfin, but my family uses Plex for now.
Try Emby. It's a more polished Jellyfin although it's not FOSS I find it much better than Plex
If I'm understanding correctly, Emby has been hostile to FOSS (alleged GPL violations, etc.) and Jellyfin forked from it. Due to that, I'm not planning to use Emby.
Having said that, I'm always interested in hearing about projects in this space. What things do you like about Emby?
Honestly it just works and works well. I had all sorts of issues with Plex with subtitles not working and weird transcoding issues where red blocks would randomly appear. Also I found Plex kinda ugly tbh. I tried Jellyfin and it seemed a bit 'hacky' but this was a few years ago so maybe it's improved but I currently have no reason to try it again. If you're using Plex/Jellyfin/Emby you are most likely pirating media so worrying about GPL violations is probably not top of the list.
Plex pass?
My problem with Kodi is even if I start at the top of a list of streams and just pick on down until one works they rarely do. The ones that do work are 180p with high contrast korean subtitles every time. I know its not like this for everyone. I have seen someone play a stream on it in good quality with nothing weird. But it seems whenever I specifically use it nothing I want to watch has a good stream.
Kodi doesn't supply streams and the addons that people make to try and integrate them are pretty much all garbage. Now if you have your own local media library, that's where kodi can shine..
I have only seen it downloaded on a firestick and people search some sort of online database. I never knew it was more than that. Interesting.
i agree with everything youve said here. people are comparing all these different products with clearly different use cases... some overlap? maybe...
the only thing i dont like about kodi is the fucking name... not sure why that bothers me so much but when they changed the name to kodi, i started playing with emby/jellyfin. of course then i realized they provide different services
well, the name, and their support forums are hot garbage.