I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) beats pretty much all streaming services in terms of UI.
Yup. I even pay for YouTube TV but if something I want to watch is available over ATSC, I switch to my Kodi tvheadend HTSP client on Chromecast (I have a pcie tuner) because the UI doesn’t make me stabby.
I moved and don’t have an ATSC setup anymore sadly. I didn’t use it much but it was great to catch the news during special events and to PVR a couple of local shows that are worth watching and hard to get elsewhere. Tvheadend is a bit of a pain, but when it works it’s great!
The Netflix plugin in Kodi is better than their own interface too 😂
I wished the MPD plugin was better though tbh
Once you grok tvh’s architecture, it’s incredibly versatile. I have a TV sound stream profile so I can listen to local news (not Sinclair thank God) in the car over icecast, or have home assistant cue it up on a Google Home. A great, underrated project. And I can share an antenna among 3 TVs without worrying about RF amplification!
Yeah it’s really good. Schedules could be made easier, but sadly the issue is at the source :/ I also wished that tuners were cheaper. DVB-T tuners are dirt cheap, they can literally be bought for less than ten bucks. It would be fantastic to have multiple channels at once on tvheadend, but I can’t justify the cost of extra ATSC tuners.
I used xbmc back when it was a Mc for xb haha kodi now seems more trouble than it’s worth
What’s the trouble with Kodi? I love it works great! Very flexible. Nothing even comes close to it in terms of functionality.
I couldn’t tell you now, it was a long time ago I fiddled with it. I just moved on to other solutions lol
Personally, I prefer Stremio (also FOSS)
Seems to rely on some externally hosted service, thanks but I’m good.
You can self host it: https://hub.docker.com/r/stremio/server
I really want to like Kodi, but somehow I’ve always struggled with its UI. I can’t seem to logically find the options I’m looking for (in the first place I look.)