I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS.
I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly.
Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.
It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs.
Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.
Well, my ISP doesn't support IPv6 for home use, at all. My IPv4 is essentially static - I can't recall the last time it changed - but while Tailscale is a single point of failure for my home network security, it's also one that I can expect to be updated faster than practically any other package.
VLC will play anything I throw at it, but it's not going to go and fetch all the metadata for me and present it in a nice way to the non-technically-oriented users around.
yeah I'm on the same boat. I just have an old laptop hooked up to the tv, which can access a shared folder on my main computer that has all the media. I control it with a wireless mouse, and get an actual fast UI with a web browser instead of the usability nightmare that is a smart tv UI. this is all Windows though, I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder, I've been meaning to look into it for a while
> I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder
It is, and while it's not hard, this was really my first experience running Linux in a long while, and boy do I now understand why people did not like systemd when it came out. It's not bad, per se, but it's not just "stick a line in /etc/fstab". However, even Copilot can put together a couple of scripts for you.
I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly.
Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.