Anon needs Jellyfin.
I prefer NGINX with autoindex. Lightweight, no JavaScript, looks like every Linux ISO mirror, filenames already have all the required info, can be quickly searched with CTRL+F, fits perfectly to my laziness.
If you want some improvement, you can use FancyIndex module.
But the files need to be in codecs supported by your browser(s). I prefer AV1+Opus in WebM container which have been supported by Firefox for a while. At this point it’s really only Safari not fully supporting AV1 because it relies on hardware decoding and Apple wants you to buy new hardware.
Sorry, your favorite media server is just files you play on a browser?
I mean, not shaming, I just had never heard of that being preferable to Plex/Emby/Jellyfin.
Yeah, I am too lazy to set up something like Jellyfin. It only makes sense for me with music, for which I use Navidrome. But again, my setup is mostly directory/filename based, so it’s really being carried with m3u playlists as opposed to proper metadata.
I mean, maybe I’ll use Jellyfin if I’ll do something in a proper way, but currently I don’t see the point of it. And anyway, I can always copy the URLs to VLC, which will even accept DVD ISO files.
e.g.:
vlc --no-dvdnav-menu http/dvdnav://192.168.49.1:8080/media/ISOs/Interstellar.iso
let’s me play entire copy of a DVD, properly with menus and bonus features, just as if I used the DVD directly.
Although I don’t do this anymore because of storage limitations, but I’ll likely return back to it once I’ll have a proper media server and LAN.
The biggest issue with that is it requires all of your media to be in a flat folder for search to work right.
Auto index has a mode to return results in json. With a touch of html and js you can make a page that will crawl the directory tree and build a simple searchable cache of name to path, and then you can play it from there. It ends up making a request per folder, but in realistic terms it’s not gonna be enough to actually be noticable.
You can then use something like this on a cron to convert anything your browser can’t play and you’re pretty close to a minimalist media server with only static files.
The one I used to use was just a bash script so I didn’t have to wrangle python modules, but I can’t seem to find it.
I ended up dropping it when I bought a nas with all that stuff built in and it generally made my life easier. Worth the money if you can afford it.
Do you just remember where you are in every show (or movie that you only partway watched)? That’s the biggest appeal of jellyfin/plex to me, so I can go in and continue from where I left off without keeping track.