So here’s the state of things right now:

I’ve got a Synology NAS with stuff like my movie collection stored on it. I think at some point I’ll move my music collection up there, too. It’s an ARM powered 2-bay thing, I’m not particularly interested in using any of Synology’s software, and there’s some stuff that won’t run on that box because it’s ARM instead of x86. I don’t really have a “server” box running.

A few years ago I bought a “commercial TV” aka one that doesn’t have Roku or whatever. For awhile, I ran OSMC (basically Debian Kodi) on a Raspberry Pi, which…I had enough problems with that it’s unlivable. I’d rather just not have a television than continue to use OSMC.

In the meantime, I built a new gaming PC for my desk, the old machine (which happens to be in a Fractal Node 202 case so it already looks like a TiVo) has been moved into the living room. It’s a Ryzen 3600/GeForce GTX-1080 machine with a bit over a terabyte of SSD and 16GB of RAM. It’s still kicking bubblegum and chewing ass. Yes, it idles at a greater power draw than the Pi pulls at full steam, but it’ll spend most of its time asleep, we’ll be okay.

I’m currently still using Mint Cinnamon on it. Which is a hilariously unusable home theater OS. Plus I have my desktop (a Ryzen 7700/Radeon 7900GRE machine running Fedora KDE) and my phone (A Galaxy S10e) that I sometimes watch media on. Some questions:

  • Why does VLC error out when trying to play mp4s stored on my NAS? Is it because SMB is Microsoft fucksewage that doesn’t actually work? Because that’s my working hypothesis.

  • I have so little information on what Plex/Jellyfin even are, I gather Plex is at least semi-commercial while Jellyfin is the open source but worse option. These may or may not have a server component that has to run on a server-like box, which I don’t and won’t have.

  • On the client side, I don’t know if they take the place of a DE the way Kodi does, or if it’s a separate app, or if you’d have to exit Plex or Jellyfin to use something like Steam, or if Steam Big Picture mode would work as a media center, but can it get to Youtube…

Is there anything out there that works better than throwing my TV away and forgetting about it?

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    Which Synology NAS is it, and can you install Container Manager on it? That might be the simplest option since your files are already on that device. There should be lots of guides out there for it.

    Container Manager is basically a worse DockGE / Portainer by Synology. It should be sufficient for pasting in the Jellyfin docker compose, but if you wanted you could also spin up DockGE/Portainer first and do it through that interface (or SSH into the NAS and do it all with the command line)

    So the setup would be

    • run Jellyfin as a Docker container on the Synology NAS (using either Container Manager or DockGE/Portainer/straight up command line)
    • try it out with the web browser/desktop app/mobile apps to see if you like it
    • find a setup that you find convenient for the TV (ex. Android TV apps with some device, the desktop app on the PC, etc)

    EDIT: Looks like there are official guides for it, as well as lots of videos on YouTube: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/synology/

    I gather Plex is at least semi-commercial while Jellyfin is the open source but worse option.

    I haven’t used Plex enough to judge, but from the comments I’ve seen it seems that Jellyfin is now on par with or better than Plex. There was also some news recently about Plex moving more core features (remote playback?) to the paid plans, so I imagine there will be more people moving over soon.

    There are a lot of options for client side apps, official and unofficial, so you might be able to find something specific to your setup