Given the previews of the new Plex experience, I think I’m going to need an alternative media player.
Here’s my background.
• My media is stored on a QNAP NAS. All my devices are made by Apple.
• My library is a decent size. About 1,500 movies, 50 TV series, 75,000 songs, plus 2,000 classical pieces (would love a better way to manage classical music).
• I use PlexAmp on my computer to listen to music all day. If I were to listen to music outside the house, PlexAmp is my only music app.
• I use Plex on Apple TV to watch my movie and TV library. To a lesser degree, I watch home movies, music videos, and various media obtained from archive.org - I call this my VHS library. I also listen to music and look at my photo library from my Apple TV.
• The Plex UX for VOD is bad so I instead use Pluto and Tubi (not that they’re much better).
• I’ll never watch content on my iPhone. I may watch on my iPad but not often.
• I share my library with family so we can watch home movies during the holidays. They sign into Plex on either Apple TV, Roku, or their phones. I’ve also been happy to share photos from within Plex but this is being stripped out to another app which will not work for us.
It’s evident that Plex is intent to shove VOD down our throats at the expense of an enjoyable experience with our own content. For the older people in my family, this simple will not work at all.
The most important aspects are (1) an Apple TV app and (2) music apps.
I want something that’s relatively easy to setup. I’m not going to spend time building docker containers and reverse proxies (unless it’s a one-click process).
I moved all our household content from Plex to Jellyfin a few months ago and it’s been pretty awesome. Can customize the shit out of it to suit your needs.
I have a QNAP server running it in a docker container and I’m not sure how to set it up on Apple TV. But if you do want external access without having to mess around with a firewall, tailscale works great and is fairly straight forward to set up.