Watch your favorite videos, movies and TV series.

OpenSource alternative to Netflix (Win, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android)

  • 0x00cl
    10·
    3 years ago

    I like to use Jellyfin. It has a nice UI and easy to access platform over a local network, though looks to me like stremio and their torrent plugins geared towards to people who want to pirate shows and movies like popcorn time.

    • beansniffer
      41·
      3 years ago

      Is Jellyfin with torrent plugins as boomer friendly as stremio? I would prefer to have an entirely free software & self hosted solution like Jellyfin, but I unfortunately also have to make it boomer friendly so other people in my family can also use it.

      • 0x00cl
        4·
        3 years ago

        I’m not sure if Jellyfin has a torrent plugin, like I said, Stremio with the torrent plugin seems to be the replacement of popcorn time.

        If you have movies or shows stored in your disk, then you can run Jellyfin and anyone with a browser will be able to watch what you have stored. You can setup accounts for your family members like you’d have in Netflix so they can keep track of what they are watching and what they have watched, limit access to certain content, etc. It’s very configurable in that sense. I’d say the UI is user-friendly.

        You can check-out their demo here https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/index.html

        • beansniffer
          2·
          3 years ago

          I’m not sure if Jellyfin has a torrent plugin, like I said, Stremio with the torrent plugin seems to be the replacement of popcorn time.

          Yeah, sorry I misread your post thinking that Jellyfin had torrent plugins like Stremio.

          I like the versatility that Stremio offers because sometimes you don’t quite know what you or others want to watch in the spur of the moment. Stremio, like Netflix, offers instant access to whatever movie someone might want to watch, whereas it seems that Jellyfin requires that someone search a torrent site in a web browser for the content they want to watch, then load up a separate torrent client to download it, then watch the content in Jellyfin. It unfortunately isn’t very user friendly to people that are tech-illiterate who just want a Netflix like experience for discovering and watching new content.

          It seems to me the biggest advantage to something like Jellyfin would be on demand transcoding of already torrented video to other clients like phones to reduce the cpu usage on those devices.

          Am I incorrect in my interpretation of the main use of Jellyfin?

          • 0x00cl
            2·
            3 years ago

            Yes, you are correct. But I must say that Stremio does have its cons and is that it doesn’t run everything locally.

            • When you run Stremio it runs a server in the background where you can access content from any browser in your network (port 11470) BUT the webpage itself loads external resources from app.strem.io, if you lose internet connection or for some reason app.strem.io is down then you won’t be able to access the server to watch content. Jellyfin runs everything locally.

            • To me it is very sketchy how they hide their “guest login” option and force you to create an account to use stremio and authenticate with a remote server. There are no local accounts. Jelly does have local accounts, you can limit their download speed, control the devices they use and the movies they can watch.

            I guess you could run your own stremio server but doesn’t look like an easy task as they don’t provide binaries and you have to compile and configure the different components yourself.

            • beansniffer
              1·
              3 years ago

              Your comment is helpful for understanding more. Thanks for your comment.

  • Arthur BesseA
    7·
    3 years ago

    https://stremio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000281412-How-Stremio-Makes-Money

    This appears to be a slick bittorrent client that presumably causes users a lot of headaches because they don’t realize they need to use a VPN (and even if they make it to the FAQ on the topic it doesn’t make clear that this is not safe to use on your home connection in many countries).

    It used to be partly-open-source-partly-not; i don’t know if it is completely open source now, but, in any case, this is not software I would ever recommend due to it being deceptive for-profit piracy software. 👎