make dumb TV work with subscriptions

Dust0741@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 17 points –

I have a dumb TV, and a spare computer. I want a nice easy way to interface with several services. (Jellyfin, disney+ etc)

I know of Kodi, but really dislike the interface. I know I could get a USB keyboard/mouse remote thing, but that isn't very elegent. Is there a simpler solution to this?

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To add to everyone else, I moved from Kodi to Jellyfin and it was a game changer for my home server solution. (I run the server off of my gaming PC)

Seconding Jellyfin. I used to run XBMC as God intended on my old OG Xbox but Kodi is so bloated and garbo these days from what I've seen.

The fact that my video collection will mostly not play in browser just breaks the entire navigation environment of Jellyfin.

I'm not sure which client device you're using, but on desktop there is the desktop player as well as jellyfin-mpv-shim which don't rely on the browser for playback, but do use it for management, show selection etc

I think the solution is to get hardware-accelerated transcoding set up correctly.

Either that, or maybe bulk-transcode all your media outside of Jellyfin and then add it all back as alternate versions and hope Jellyfin is smart enough to choose the best supported version automatically?

(I'm in the process of setting up a Jellyfin server and noticing the same issue with some of my media.)

But with Kodi, there is zero transcoding required. I just play directly from an SMB share without the processing overhead of transcoding. So, despite Kodi's many flaws, I've stuck with it.

Doesn't that just mean the clients (running Kodi) need to have all the right codecs installed themselves? If that's an option, then Jellyfin wouldn't need to do any transcoding either.

The advantage of Jellyfin is that the client apps can run on things like Rokus where you can't install Kodi and/or that have limited codec support.