Selecting Media Server OS

Have you looked into Amahi?

why would i use amahi?

Fedora based, has most of what you want baked in, or as an app. I'm just asking questions because I'm curious.

it is missing several key apps.

Handbrake, Emby, SABNZBD or NZBGet, etc

Sabnzbd is there. Emby isn't, but Plex is. Handbrake is not. No big deal. I was just curious what you thought of it.

IMHO Emby > Plex

I got sucked into the Plex ecosystem. What makes you like Emby better?

it does everything Plex does and the "premium" cost is only $4.99/month. The Server is much more manageable and i can drill down on everything. It is very extensible and open source. It also allows me to stream TV and record it like a TiVo

That's fair. I've tried Emby for that reason, but I had issues with it not playing videos. Did they get their HTML5 web player down yet?

have had no issues with the web player. The only times videos dont play via the dedicated app for a platform is when the video being played uses codecs the player platform may not have.

See, that's the thing that Plex solves. Before sending media, it negotiates supported codecs and if needed, it transcodes to a format that's playable by the client in realtime.

Emby does that too. I just choose not to use that function as my hardware is aging.

that and I am trying to standardize my file types to h.264 mkv

Oh, this transcodes on the fly, saves the buffer in temp or ram, and streams it. Doesn't change the persistent file format.

no shit. I know how transcoding works. When you transcode on the fly, it eats up system resources and cpu cycles. If this was simply serving media and not collecting it as well, that would be just fine.

Standardizing formats on the server usually reduces the amount of space taken up if you optimize them.

Aah, guess I misunderstood. Excuse me.

Is Flatpak tied to Gnome? I was looking at the available runtimes and I don't see one for just a basic Python program, like Sabnzbd or Sickbeard.

http://flatpak.org/runtimes.html

Runtimes are not package dependencies. They are not separated from the app to allow dependency resolution. They are separated out in order to allow a different entity to maintain and update them. The idea is that they are pretty minimal (to some degree) and come with a well defined ABI and stability/lifetime guarantee.

If, above this, you need more dependencies, in the flatpak model you need to bundle them yourself. Such bundling can be done however you want. For instance you can reuse existing packages from some distro, you can build the yourselves, or whatever.

Technically you have to specify a runtime, or things will not run. But if you want you can create your own runtime that is empty and use that. This means you have to supply everything though, as you won't even have an ld.so.

The runtimes will be GNOME and KDE

For media servers there are two things for me:

1) server media servers - FeeNAS / Nas4Free w/ ZFS raidz1 - raidz3

2) Media streaming machines- OS does not matter to me. debian or centos based will work fine. I throw on there kodi, and launch kodi. From there everything should work without an issue.

Been working on my setup over the years and this is the easiest and most reliable setup config I've gotten so far. Most useful, also.

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x2 to ubuntu for the simple fact, support. I've dabbled in Linux for a while now (typing from an Ubuntu laptop) and questions like this always gets 'Arch this' 'Enterprise distro that' etc etc coming from hard core linux disciples, system admins, IT gurus etc. Every time I've tried something other than Ubuntu its been an overwhelming learning experience, I always end up back to Ubuntu because 90% of google results will be for Ubuntu. My deviations from this is I moved my ZFS pool from Ubuntu to FreeNAS and I run CentOS for Splunk because it runs like crud on Ubuntu.

This thread is awesome, seeing info on things other than Plex and Kodi for once haha. I have a Hauppauge 1250 I'd really like to put to use and need to do a lot of research...

Im actually having a hell of a time getting my HVR-1250 cards to work. They can scan for channels but never pick up anything.