Right now I use Plex, mainly because that's what is available on the Synology NAS that is part of my home lab network.

What do you consider to be the 'best' software for media encoding and streaming?

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Before I bought our Synology I had thought about using OpenNAS and put something together.

Friend from work set his up and it has a lot of nice features and GUI that provided a lot of control.

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My needs are fairly simple. I used to use subsonic but I was looking for something more advanced. I found Madsonic but I didn't like the subscription model they used.

Finally I found minidlna which seems to do the trick for what I need, which is to watch movies and play music on my TV.

Unfortunately my TV doesn't handle all the codecs that some videos are encoded in and minidlna doesn't seem to transcode, or if it does, I've not figured it out.

For my Alexa, I have the MyMedia Skill, which is $5 per year. It works fairly well but it's a little clunky, "Alex, ask MyMedia to play..." and you may not get exactly what you're looking for if you have studio and live versions of the same song unless you try something like "Alex, ask MyMedia to play song Money for Nothing from album Brothers in Arms"

Another option I use from time to time is Ampache, which is a self hosted jukebox type script, since all my media is on my Linux server, I can share it between different programs.

I'd be interested to hear other people's solutions to home media sharing.
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My needs are fairly simple. I used to use subsonic but I was looking for something more advanced. I found Madsonic but I didn't like the subscription model they used.

I use Plex for my media server. Its fairly simple to set up and so far all my devices seem to have apps that suport it.
The hardest part I had was trying to load the DVDs into the library. After some trial and error I found that MakeMKV seemed to work the best I rip the DVDs into MKV and then use Handbrake to convert them to MP4.

The next challenge I had was getting Plex to recognize the movies and TV shows and name them correctly. For the movies I look on IMDB for the movie and I try to name the MP4 using the same name/year. For example, "Star Wars Episode I - The Phanton Menace (1999).mp4". For the TV Shows I add th Season, Episode, and name if I have it to the name. For example, "The Dukes of Hazzard - S01E01 - One Armed Bandits.mp4"

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I use a Plex Server which is on one of my NAS' I have currently about 5 or 600 movies on it, and probably 3 or 4000 songs, mainly entire Catalogs of music artists. Sinatra every album, ELO every album, Bee Gee's every album. I can go on. I use the Synology NAS for this. I access it on any TV in my house, and also when away from home on my phone and in most hotels I have stayed at can cast a movie to the TV there. As for my Music, I can play that anywhere also, I can blue tooth it in my car, hook my phone up to a set of speakers at work etc. I love my Media but I really haven't done anything with it all of late. I need to fix my directories in Plex of my Movies and get them straight as I had a crash of a computer which held my original Plex info and lost it all so I had to start fresh with the NAS.

So that is my story...

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On 09 Oct 2023, David Smith said the following...

I use Plex for my media server. Its fairly simple to set up and so far
all my devices seem to have apps that suport it.
The hardest part I had was trying to load the DVDs into the library.
After some trial and error I found that MakeMKV seemed to work the best
I rip the DVDs into MKV and then use Handbrake to convert them to MP4.

I have used that also in the past, (MakeMKV) it works real well.. Back in the day when I was ripping DVD's non-stop, I used a litany of different programs. I would rip the Video first from the DVD using software from TMPGenc which I was able to clean it up some if needed, then I would rip the audio and upscale it to 48000hz if it were lower. Clean up any issues with the sound etc. Then re-assemble it all into a .mp4 file, sometimes audio and video would be off and I would have to start over but for the most part it was clean and clear. I then got into bootlegs a little and did the same thing, cleaning up people laughing or clapping etc. This became a full time job for me and I gave up after a few years! I don't do it any longer, if I want a movie I will buy it and save it digitally using a MakeMKV type of program if needed. I lost my want to watch a new movie every night so I haven't converted a movie in well over 10 years...

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My needs are fairly simple. I used to use subsonic but I was looking for something more advanced. I found Madsonic but I didn't like the subscription model they used.
Another option I use from time to time is Ampache, which is a self hosted jukebox type script, since all my media is on my Linux server, I can
share it between different programs.

Hi! I use emby for more than a few years now. I tried to use plex but with little success. I know emby is not the panacea, but I think is worth the try.
You have two subscription models: Free and paid, of course.
There are few diferences between them and for a few years a used the free mode without any problem.
The paid version give me a few options, like including the app that can be used in any SmartTV, and a few more like offline media, hardware accelerated transcoding, and the app that I use in my Android TV, just to mention a few. You can purchase the app alone and is more cheaper, of course.

If you want a more traditional media center, perhaps you can try Kodi, which will work with most Linux distributions out there. You can even run it on a Raspberry Pi, but, of course, would suffer from some perfomance degradation.

Let me know if you need any help if you like to try emby. (this is not a paid promotion, I promess!)

Salu/2!
Cyberzoo

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Right now I use Plex, mainly because that's what is available on the Synology NAS that is part of my home lab network.

Ahh, ok, I understand! Using something like a Synology NAS here is quite expensive, so I have to take more traditional approaches, like some old computer with a bunch of disks to act as a NAS server.

Being a dumpster diver has paid well in the last few years. :)

What do you consider to be the 'best' software for media encoding and streaming?

Talking by encoders per se, ffmpeg is the swiss army knife of encoding/conversion. No doubt about it. I even use it in one of my previuos jobs, which was some sort of local netflix streaming service.
We relayed on ffmpeg to convert/encode in multiple formats for multiple platforms. As for streaming, I really dont know. If you talk about media centers, as I stated before, emby is my first choice. But for streaming, I really dont know.

Salu/2!
Cyberzoo

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