Kodi/XBMC has been providing that for like 20 years though…
What jellyfin does provide that Kodi doesn’t is on the fly transcoding for watching on mobile device and remote access. If you don’t need that, Kodi might be a better choice providing a far wider array of features.
Personally I prefer jellyfins interface. Plus its easy for my bon tech familyyto use jellyfin
That’s fine, but it still doesn’t do a tenth of what Kodi can do.
I also don’t really see how it’s easier in terms of browsing. It’s a list of movies and tv shows…
You’re not wrong but there are still drawbacks to Kodi where Jellyfin ends up being better. In my use case, with 5 tvs in the house, 2 are hooked up to Nvidia shield tvs but the other 3 are Chromecast w/ Google TV which have very limited storage unless I want to spend a fortune in hubs for each one to add a USB drive or micro SD.
With kodi installed I would regularly hit the storage limit of the device and have all kinds of weird bugs. Just as an example I had my daughter set up with a kids only account, but account switching would cause Kodi to become unresponsive for anywhere from 30 seconds to having to do a hard reset of the device. Jellyfin gives me the same access to my library with a lighter, more streamlined, persistent interface across devices and with easy and fast profiles. It still allows me to keep a pi as the host so the whole setup is low power (important for me as we’re on solar, every watt helps!)
I don’t really need the Kodi plugins I used to have if the main purpose of streaming my local content isn’t smooth and simple for the family. This is coming from a long time XBMC user, I’ve been running it since my original modded Xbox in the early 2000s.
