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.
Best way is to use both MPV and VLC, as per requirements. And its not like either are resource hogging or storage hogging, and both are supreme programs.
That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC… I haven’t really had any reason to install MPC in… wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.
MPC has a feature over others, which is invaluable on Windows – seekbar video preview. It works exactly like YouTube or any video site that shows a small thumbnail preview of video time position. PotPlayer’s performance on Windows is the best to this day. I use MPC/PotPlayer on Windows and MPV/VLC on Linux.
Weird: I just noticed that I have seekbar preview on my desktop install of VLC, but not mobile. Now I want to compare to the Win version as well, because I’m noticing some menus look different than I remember.
Honestly, I install VLC just to snag the file-associations away from the WMP / Windows Video apps, because they remain insecure by default.