Is there a Roon equivalent for video?

I already did. Post #60 August 2016 :sunglasses::sunglasses:

iirc there is at least one other here who posted, and I expect that there are quite a few more.

Not much longer for me though. Will move back to the UK next year.

Seven years on (!) is there any progress on other apps which act a bit like Roon for video? I have a large DVD/Bluray collection, including lots of series, which would be great to browse in a more intuitive way. Trying to recall, e.g., which episode of X-files is which, with the insane names they chose for each ep, always prompts a deep dive into online episode guides… surely there is now a better way!

Jellyfin is an open source app similar to Plex:

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Plex is as Roon like as it goes, been using it for donkey years been rock solid for me. Tried others and didn’t get on with them . Plex support on TVs and other boxes is far greater than the others. As long as you have a modern intel pc that does intel video acceleration it will handle most things without any issues even if the device your playing them on doesn’t.

It also has the bonus of being my music solution backup for mobile as its PlexAmp is way better than ARC.

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I would recommend Kodi.
The fact alone that it is free software comparing to paid alternatives gives you a real good cost free functionality. It runs on Windows, Linux, Android, can be installed on literally anything that you can call a Compouter. I have it running on laptops, Raspi’s (I would go voor RP 4 or 5) and on mobile devices.
If you have a considerable library (I have about 600 movies and 500 Series on my NAS) you for instance can find movies and series of certain artist, filter for Genres etc.
Just my personal favourite :slight_smile:

Thanks guys, I will look into all those. I am on a Mac, if that makes a difference?

Nothing like Roon really.
You can say, Kodi + Emby / Jellyfin w/ an external player like JRiver (where Kodi provides a UI, Emby/Jellyfin provides the library and JRiver is the player) is pretty close but the metadata is not where it needs to be and the handling of different versions / bonus material is frankly not great anywhere. TMDB isn’t the be all end all of film metadata it just isn’t.

I second all of this… I tried ARC once, and it was a pale comparison to PlexAmp…

As for video, Plex is hard to beat - even with all their fiddling lately. I’ve fooled around with all of the others, and I keep coming back to Plex. Sometimes the granddaddy of them all is still the best.

@Pedro_Belo I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you are either not using Plex correctly, or you have endpoints that require transcoding.

I have direct play enabled for everything, and I just get the raw data at all of my clients - it most certainly handles 4K… NVIDIA Shield connected to the TV, 4K phone, laptops…in and out of the house. Never skips a beat.

Again though, the ā€˜streaming’ to client devices part isn’t really what differentiates Roon from other music offerings. It’s the metadata and entity resolution, this idea of a ā€˜global’ identity for entities, with truly rich metadata isn’t really a huge priority for Plex, Emby, JF, etc.

Not sure I agree. Plex has tons of metadata for each film I have as much as Roon does for music. If you mean versions not sure what purpose it would serve for films and TV really. They have collections which does what it says on the tin and works well. I’ve tried all the others over the last 20+ years and Plex endsd up being the one I stuck with. Used Kodi for a while when it was still XBMC and on the original XBOX.

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Plex even supports that now, albeit as a premium ā€˜Plex Pass’ feature.

Oh I have plexpass bought it when first offered. I had forgotten it does that as have had it for a few versions where I had standard version and then extended. Rare I have that mind so had forgotten. I rarely use it for video these days as not bought anything new for years. Gone the opposite way for movies and tv that I have gone for music. I just stream them these days where music I continue to buy.

That doesn’t really scratch the surface of what it needs to do. TMDB is not a truly comprehensive metadata source unfortunately. I dove into this heavily, and ended up building my own thing.
For example, unless Plex has changed, they don’t do complete credits. You get your cast, writers, directors, producers I think, that’s really not what I’m after. TMDB’s credits are also typically more sparse than some of the commercial metadata provider alternatives which is a bit of a problem, especially when you’re dealing with credits on TV episodes for example.

I’ve also never really liked the way extras / versions are handled in any of these if we’re being honest. It’s fine if you have like a version or two, doesn’t really work for ā€˜I have 6 masters of this film, and need notes about them and proper edition / version discriminators’

shrug

This is all sort of beyond what I would even expect from one of these but I personally just never really found that they nail some of the things I came to expect from using Roon for a long time.

It shows way more credits than those, besides showing full credits would be overload given the amount of people involved, does anyone care about who did the catering? It lists most of the primary ones that most would care about.

I don’t think Roon manages full credits for its albums either so closer here than you think. TivO and MusicBrainz are hardly the best sources either and have tons of material missing in action. Wikipedia is hardly 100% accurate either and lots of times woefully out of date.

Not sure what you want exists for film or music, but both give it a good go. But they are only as strong as the data sources then legally or cost wise can pull from and none of these are perfect.

That’s actually rad that Plex started showing more credits. Back when I was using it, you got basically just the ones I mentioned and that was it unfortunately.

What I wanted didn’t exist when I built it.
It was very much a, likely nobody needs this but myself, situation so I wasn’t really expecting to find something off the shelf / commercially. Does anyone else care about finding a stunt director/coordinator’s credits? Probably not.

Plex on a Windows 10 PC then a Samsung TV with the Plex app loaded

It’s pretty good as video players go, could compare it to Roon at a stretch

Unfortunately JRiver doesn’t have a Samsung client