[untog]

I wish Plex would focus a little. They're simply not big enough to be doing the number of things they're doing and do them well. I'm currently using Plex as a DVR service for my cable TV and it mostly works, except sometimes it doesn't and it's all but impossible to work out why.

It's all the more infuriating because so much of what they do is based on open source stuff (the original version was based on XBMC, though I think little of that is left now), but they don't open source anything themselves. I'd love to take a dig through the code to maybe fix these issues myself but I can't.

There is a rival service, Emby, which is open source:

https://emby.media

Last I looked their frontend apps were lacking (and that's not an area I can help in, sadly) but it might be time to take another look.

[ReverseCold]

You can't even use the global media keys on Windows to play/pause/skip track when the normal plex isn't in focus. (Basically unusable as a music player).

All the non-iOS apps also feel slow and eat battery on modern hardware.

This app is a solution to all that for music. Cool. But why can't the regular app just be good?

[AdmiralAsshat]

I don't see the need for another Plex rival. XBMC/Kodi is perfectly fine. It can play local content swimmingly. It can set itself up as a UPnP server so that Roku's, consoles, and Prime sticks can grab its content. It can even setup a web client so that you can access the library in a browser tab on the local network. It's also FOSS.

Really, the only use-case I see where Plex beats Kodi is if you have all of your media stored in the cloud. But I feel like for real media die-hards, that very quickly becomes impractical (e.g. I have about 3 TB of pictures / music / video and storing that all on Amazon S3 servers would run me hundreds of dollars a year).

[untog]

Plex beats Kodi in two areas for me: DVR service, which Kodi doesn't provide, and remote playback. Plex will transcode videos on demand to smaller storage sizes, and store them in its iOS and Android apps for offline viewing (and their Roku app is far superior to Kodi UPnP). When it works, it works great: like having my own version of YouTube TV/Sling TV, only without any of the DRM/non skippable ad nonsense. But it doesn't always work great.

The reason I pointed out Emby is that it has all the features Plex does that Kodi does not. Kodi has some stuff available by plugin but matching the features I require from Plex has never been possible.

[sysbell]

http://kodi.wiki/view/PVR

[untog]

Yeah, I tried that, but couldn't find a backend that would work seamlessly. And besides, it still can't do the transcoding/mobile app stuff Plex can.

I love the customisability of Kodi but there's something to be said for a front-to-back, opinionated solution. It works a lot better (...even though my original complaint is that Plex can be flaky...)

[agentdrtran]

I use plex locally 99% of the time and the UX beats Kodi hands down. It has so many more nice features and works so much better.