Ok, you’re gonna have to unpack that one for me! Plex was always messing things up with transcoding, and I hate the Jellyfin UI and always had trouble getting it working and keeping it working.
Likely a codec issue with your client player. The client couldn’t play the file (either video or audio) natively, so the server transcoded the file so it could.
Transcoding is a feature. I understand why you would rather it direct stream, but you’ve got to make sure the client can play the file natively.
Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
Fair. And I agree with your stance. But I don’t feel like setting something else up again, especially if it’s a thing that has caused me problems in the past, like Jellyfin. I miss XBMC.
I switched to Emby. Which I now access via SenPlayer. Am I doing this right?!?!
Well if you ask me, not really, I disavowed emby years ago and afaic its just Plex and Jellyfin in this space to me
Ok, you’re gonna have to unpack that one for me! Plex was always messing things up with transcoding, and I hate the Jellyfin UI and always had trouble getting it working and keeping it working.
How was Plex messing up transcoding?
It kept trying to transcode things when I just wanted direct uncompressed streaming
Likely a codec issue with your client player. The client couldn’t play the file (either video or audio) natively, so the server transcoded the file so it could.
Transcoding is a feature. I understand why you would rather it direct stream, but you’ve got to make sure the client can play the file natively.
It’s an AppleTv 4k. It shouldn’t have had a problem, and it works fine with Emby.
You’re right, it shouldn’t have a problem. I know substances can sometimes force transcoding.
Here’s a comment I wrote on it about a year ago
Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)
Fair. And I agree with your stance. But I don’t feel like setting something else up again, especially if it’s a thing that has caused me problems in the past, like Jellyfin. I miss XBMC.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) is still there as far as I’ve seen. So if you liked XBMC give it a try maybe.