I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).
But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.
So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.
It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.
There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.
Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.
Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
I would love to see an Open Source media center that supports streaming services. I wouldn't care if the services say "we only support 1080p for browsers / open source, anything more needs a locked-down device". (Perhaps the project could have some add-on you can buy that's a physical hardware dongle for doing 4k HDR and emitting HDCPed HDMI.) I already live with that for watching on my laptop. Just having watchable basic-resolution streaming would make it a one-stop-shop.
I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand.
Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.
i had media center powered by a few perl script that would transcode all videos into formats that ps3 supported in 2007-ish. Yes ffmpeg had a lot of options, 99% of them does not matter, there really only 3 ways to stream to client: as is, repack streams into something client support (i.e. your source is mkv) or transcode into something client support (clients know which formats they support).
People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".
You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding.
But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.
Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.
No. It was built before Android / Apple integrations existed and was built around tactile controls and voice interactions. But I think Apple Car play is a far far more useful product these days than anything I built 15 years ago. Even if their touch controls are an ergonomic step backwards.
It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
I like Tailscale, but it's difficult to argue with a straight face that it's not seriously suffered from product creep.
This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?
IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.
I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."
EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"
Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.
I actually don't think it's worth noting. I think, if a particular code standard issue is really of value, it will be obvious. You will propose it and nobody will argue. I think the fact that code standards are contentious is proof they are extremely low value. Subtle effects are indistinguishable from superstition.
I think the particular choice of coding standards is low value, but I think the consistency they bring has a lot of value, at least potentially.
As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.
No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child: it's not what you think it is and it probably doesn't apply to whatever situation it's being invoked.
> No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child
I tend to pride myself on my ability to read and comprehend things, and I feel like I never saw you say this. I'll go check your comment history since it might have been in a separate subthread.
That aside, you're advocating for projects that have wildly different coding styles from file to file and function to function?
I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?
Oh, interesting. So you're advocating for projects that have wildly different styles encoding from file to file?
I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?
I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style.
There is an easy to define line: there is no line. It's not a boundary where "over here is good code" and "over there, not" we just don't have a good idea of where the line is. No. There is absolutely no line.
Here we go: as soon as you ask for any kind of definition or rigor around AI development, people will work hard to shut you up.
You're asking an extremely reasonable question, IMHO, especially given these are projects with limited resources going up against generally larger, better-resourced projects. AI is an obvious point of leverage in such a situation, and so there is a lot of potential to reverse engineer using AI and get good results.
What all of these requests fundamentally come down to is "How are you filtering for quality?", which is an extremely difficult question given the state of, for example, the app stores.
There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?
But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.
So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.
There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.
Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.
Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.
People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".
But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.
Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?
IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.
I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."
EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"
As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.
> No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child
I tend to pride myself on my ability to read and comprehend things, and I feel like I never saw you say this. I'll go check your comment history since it might have been in a separate subthread.
That aside, you're advocating for projects that have wildly different coding styles from file to file and function to function?
I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?
I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?
The fact that we are disagreeing on this point is great evidence that there isn’t an easy to define, proverbial line in the sand.
There is an easy to define line: there is no line. It's not a boundary where "over here is good code" and "over there, not" we just don't have a good idea of where the line is. No. There is absolutely no line.
That would be a good feature here.
There's also an implicit judgment in your question. Is well-designed, well-tested AI-generated code worse than poorly written, but hand-typed code?
You're asking an extremely reasonable question, IMHO, especially given these are projects with limited resources going up against generally larger, better-resourced projects. AI is an obvious point of leverage in such a situation, and so there is a lot of potential to reverse engineer using AI and get good results.
What all of these requests fundamentally come down to is "How are you filtering for quality?", which is an extremely difficult question given the state of, for example, the app stores.