I have since ripped all my Blu-Rays and DVDs to the server and ditched my optical players. Because plex can transcode on the server I can watch my videos on any device I want to. I don't really touch plex from an administrative standpoint except very occasionally hit and Update button on the server. However, everything is so much simpler and trouble-free. I switched to plex about a year ago with Roku as the client. I liked the Kodi UI as I could customize it how I wanted. I also had emulators for old consoles running and could browse/launch them from the ROM Browser plugin in Kodi. The plus sides to that setup were that I had my remote run a script to switch from Kodi to Steam Big Picture and could play games on the machine. This also really limited me to only watching videos on the one TV with the desktop attached. Also, standby restoration from the remote was always getting screwed up by windows updates or power outages which annoyed the other people in the house. I switched over to a full windows 7 desktop, but I really didn't like having loud noisy hardware next to the TV. My primary client started as a hacked Apple TV 1 but it was too slow and limited. Kodi can't transcode on the server, so if the file bitrate is too much for the device to handle, you just can't play it.
I would have many videos which I couldn't play on lower end devices.
I ended up having to truncate the MySQL database and start over a couple times, as the data would get corrupted and it would crash on start. Every time I tried to upgrade all of my clients to a new version, I would have issues. I had a server to hold a single copy of the files and the database. Also some may be better for streaming music, TV shows, displaying pictures and so on. I am also sure some programs have a better database for movie info. Of course the layouts or navigation of the programs is a personal preference.
It appears one of the main pros of PLEX is the ability to stream remotely. I know this has potential of slowing down movie streaming, but so far I prefer that instead of dedicating a computer specifically for a PLEX server. For PLEX, I use my diskstation as storage for my movies as well as a PLEX server. I know some programs require hardware in addition to a diskstation. If anyone here has tried all three of these programs, can you please provide a brief breakdown of the three? Also, please add more programs to the list if there are others I should seriously consider when choosing the program I am going to go with. I understand the main options all have pros and cons and I have come across some comparison charts online. However, I also am aware of other streaming programs including KODI and MediaPortal.
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