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by Borealid 483 days ago
Firsly, I have multiple tens of terabytes of movies (painful to duplicate), and I watch them with their original menus in Kodi.

Secondly, a BDMV can't be turned into a single correct linear representation - for example, the Star Trek TOS discs have the ability to toggle back and forth between original and CG-remastered graphics seamlessly. As another example, I have stereoscopic 3D blu-rays; should the transcode be the left eye view, or side-by-side 3D with an ultrawide file?

Finally, transcoding necessarily sacrifices quality. Remuxing wouldn't, but Jellyfin usually refuses to stream remuxed containers and insists on transcoding to attach subtitles (their javascript web player and even app don't seem to handle the subs correctly?).

To sum up, turning a disc folder into a single file requires losing content.
2 comments
nativeit 483 days ago
This is an interesting take, thanks for describing it. I think most people, myself included, would find your setup a little odd, but I completely understand why you're doing it. It would make many (most?) home media servers a little hobbled, especially if you wanted to stream content to mobile devices outside of the home, but it sounds as if this is more of a replacement for the old pile of set-top boxes for you, rather than a general service to all your devices, is that a fair interpretation?
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Borealid 483 days ago
Yes, what I've got is like a streaming service, but at much higher quality and with a selection that doesn't rotate out as rights lapse.

The stuff that Jellyfin would provide - being able to watch from a device using just a web browser and no client install - is nice-to-have, not need-to-have.

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robhlt 483 days ago
The "Jellyfin for Kodi" plugin (not Jellycon!) supports a "native path" streaming mode that just directly passes the raw video file to Kodi, avoiding Jellyfin's transcoding entirely. I've never used it with BDMV's, but it does work with other formats Jellyfin can't transcode properly like Dolby Vision.

Also, if you do ever want to remux those discs, mkv does support both those features now (player support is lacking though). You'll want to look for "3D MVC" support, and including 2 video tracks in one mkv is no problem.

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Borealid 483 days ago
The reason I'd use Jellyfin is to stream things to a non-Kodi client (a web browser). If I have a Kodi client, I would just read the files as-is.

I don't believe that mkv supports bd-j menus. Happy to be proven wrong on that if you have some further reading I could do.

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