[walrus01]

Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it.

I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

[NamTaf]

If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.

However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.

[hn_throw2025]

I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.

I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).

[taylortbb]

The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.

Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.

Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.

[walrus01]

Yeah I would definitely need to look into some kind of real time transcoding setup (jellyfin, etc) if I had a use case for remote watching of things on any other less-capable platforms, particularly that can't handle x265 or AV1 encoded things.

Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).

[Kirby64]

> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.

[walrus01]

That's definitely a consideration, and I'm not watching 72GB 3-hour length 4K movies remotely if the far end's internet connection is insufficient. But the times that I find myself in such a place are fairly uncommon these days. If I were spending a lot of time in places where Internet service was considerably worse than where I travel now, I would probably just download the 1080p, HEVC/x265, 2.2GB total file size version of a movie and call that "ehh, good enough".

[wildzzz]

After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.

The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.

[brailsafe]

If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.

In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.