I haven’t tried Jellyfin but people’s talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn’t need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it’s not quite the same and does things I don’t really need.
“Family friendly UI” is “ultra-advanced” stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)
There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of (what was then) non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I’m just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.
That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn’t really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn’t even seem to have the concept of a user.
I want to like Kodi, but Jellyfin just has a less obtrusive interface
I haven’t tried Jellyfin but people’s talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn’t need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it’s not quite the same and does things I don’t really need.
Yes, I liked the interface of Jellyfin as a more family friendly media browsing UI but I hate the wasted CPU cycles of transcoding unnecessarily.
“Family friendly UI” is “ultra-advanced” stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)
There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of (what was then) non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I’m just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.
That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn’t really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn’t even seem to have the concept of a user.