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Comment by hnlmorg

5 hours ago

In the TV and Media section (https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media) there are 11 recommendations and 4 of them are XBMC.

There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?

18 comments

hnlmorg

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piaste  5 hours ago

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).

But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.

So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.

  • hnlmorg  5 hours ago

    It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.

    There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.

    Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.

    Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?

    • buran77  3 hours ago

      > It’s not that difficult to be honest.

      Sounds easy if all you have to do is write a short comment about it. People who actually did it, like the recently retired lead of the Jellyfin project, didn't make it sound like it's "not that difficult" [1].

      If you want ot vibe code a project for yourself it's probably reasonable amount of effort. But if you want to build a product, something with polish, something not held together by spit and scotch tape, something reliable, it won't be easy.

      [1] https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

      1 reply →

    • JoshTriplett  4 hours ago

      I would love to see an Open Source media center that supports streaming services. I wouldn't care if the services say "we only support 1080p for browsers / open source, anything more needs a locked-down device". (Perhaps the project could have some add-on you can buy that's a physical hardware dongle for doing 4k HDR and emitting HDCPed HDMI.) I already live with that for watching on my laptop. Just having watchable basic-resolution streaming would make it a one-stop-shop.

      4 replies →

    • metek  4 hours ago

      I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand.

      Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.

      4 replies →

  • cosmic_cheese  5 hours ago

    It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.

    In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.