I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
VLC >> everything else
One thing that I hate about VLC (hasn’t made me drop it in 15 years but alas) is that you can hit E to go forward one frame but there’s no key (nor capacity to set your own) to go back one frame.
Is it a niche use case? Sure probably. But not having the option to set one myself kills me whenever I frameskip one too far and have to shift-left and mash E again.
i don’t think it’s a niche feature, and totally agree, very annoying. there’s some long technical explanation about like stream buffering but i don’t care, many other players have it. you can rewind but not rewind 1 frame?
From what I recall it has to do with encoding and how the data stored references the following frame but not previous. Still seems like some engineering could be done to solve, so it it’s not as simple as “current Frame–”
It’s absolutely possible, though. MPV has it. It definitely takes longer than going forward, and sometimes I have to press the “back one frame” shortcut 2-5 times per frame. But, it does exist.
Removed by mod
Different tools for different purposes
No different tools. Only VLC!
MPV is better than VLC, but it clearly depend of the utilisation.
vlc is best for flac’s
In MPV you can litteraly use shaders and upscaler to improve significantly the image.
See : https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K https://github.com/butterw/bShaders https://artoriuz.github.io/blog/mpv_upscaling.html
VLC doesn’t support shaders.
Other great stuff with MPV is change everything, from the UI to keyboard bind. And of course MPV is totaly usable with the command line (is better than use a gui btw, you can see the errors and other stuff).
excuse me but what the fuck does music have to do with shaders
I have been using MPC as long as I can remember. Never could make the jump to VLC. Currently run MPC-BE.
Mpv.io if you are using low end computer to watch high bitrate videos or if you have high end computer you can use various image upscalar algorithm to improve your anime quality, Where VLC lags
for desktop I prefer mpv
IINA on macOS
Removed by mod
I wish VLC updated their UI to include a dark mode. I’ve never had luck with VLC skins
Try v4 (edge)
What about media player classic black edition?
VLC is heavily bloated with features you need a guide to use (may as well use a command line tool if you need to refer to a guide every time). It crashes (or did about 2 years ago) some of our Linux systems. MPV spanks the piss out of it.