I’m looking for alternatives to the Plex Media Server.

I’m good for playback/browsing clients, but I’m interested in seeing what else is out there for serving media files over the network with some kind of sensical external access.

The open nature of Jellyfin looks like a lot of fun! Emby is closed, but so is PMS. I’d imagine the folks here have some unique insights into why Jellyfin is better, and I’d love to hear them!

I see a lot of frustration around here, which I completely understand (this is mostly a support forum, after all!), but I wanted to share my appreciation for the fantastic bit of kit these fine folks have built and maintained for all us home media server fanatics - the Plex Media Server.

The sheer volume of edge-cases and operating conditions that they have to countenance is mind-boggling. Wildly differing hardware, network topology, operating systems... the fact that it works at all is a testament to their craft and dedication, and I want to express my gratitude for that work (outside of my Plex Pass Lifetime status, of course).

The combination of the automated metadata gathering for media items, the metadata API, and the unified direct streaming/transcoding URL all makes for a powerful and impressive solution to a really, really hard set of problems.

And it's stable enough for 3rd party development! While I know some folks are sick of seeing "I built an app that..." and "I was tired of [something] so I made..." posts, it's a sign of platform maturity that developers are even able to build against it, let alone to have a market that's potentially large enough to make their efforts worthwhile.

Yeah it breaks sometimes - all things do. Anyone who claims that a given solution is "flawless" or "perfect" has not, in my humble opinion, used it enough.

Well done, Plex engineers! 👏👏👏

If I could make one small request, it would be a setting to enable more verbose error messages for the streaming API endpoints, or at least better documentation on how to construct transcode decision requests for common media players and devices (for me, specifically, the AVPlayer framework running on various Apple devices 😜). While it's 100% a best practice to return 400 in production, sometimes when I'm developing I need a bit more than "Client error" to make progress. I tried enabling verbose logging but that didn't seem to change what the transcode decision endpoint returned.

P.S. I know that open-source alternatives perform similarly and have equally dedicated and talented people working on them - I'm not trying to engage in Jellyfin erasure, I'm just not using those platforms and so I can't speak to their capabilities.