Ghost Stories? Because it’s a known sticking point in the community.

Easily solved, too. Unmatch it and then match it (not auto match). The one you want should be one of the options.

To be fair, they gave fair warning

As someone who meticulously organises media… this was not a problem for either Plex or Jellyfin.

The one thing that gets both of them fucked up for some reason is Ghost Stories, even with the TVDB tag, which should make it a non-issue. Still, it’s easy to fix, on both platforms.

My media looks like this:

Movies: [decade][Title as it appears on TVDB] ([Year]) ([Special things like Directors Cut or whatever]) ([Resolution]).mkv

Shows (including anime): [Show Title][Show Title] S[season]E[episode] [Episode title].mkv

Music: [Artist]([Year]) [Album title][Track Number] [Track title].m4a

Oh, another issue you will run into, with shows, is “fan ordering.” A good one for this is Sword Art Online. Some very vocal fans hate that there’s a fourth season. They don’t actually hate the content of the fourth season, they just think it should be combined with the third season for whatever dumb ass reason people on the Internet get incensed about stupid shit. They tried to plead their case on the TVDB forums and got shot down. So if you go by their order, the latter half of the episodes won’t be named and won’t have descriptions. Then, whenever the fifth season comes out, if you try to call it the fourth season, it’ll get the titles and descriptions of the actual fourth season that’s out now. So you can’t do that.

If you’re having issues with TV shows, get an app called Rename My TV Series. It’s on Windows, it’s on Mac, and it’s on Linux. And it’s free. Or you could pirate FileBot, I guess. Or pay for it. I’m not your dad. But I’ll use free software over warez any day, as long as it does what I need. Why pirate when the free version does just as good? Just like Plex and Jellyfin, RMTVS uses TVDB, so you know your filenames will comply with your media server. And, if you’re on Plex (not sure about Jellyfin on this specific one), you can rename the seasons, so you could call Season 4 “Season 3, Part II” and everything will still work. However, I named my SAO seasons “Sword Art Online,” “Sword Art Online II”, “Sword Art Online: Alicization,” and “Sword Art Online: Alicization: War of Underworld.” It looks really cool, since that anime doesn’t use seasons, each season actually has a slightly different name for the show. (It’s probably, if we’re being that nit picky, several shows in one franchise, but that’s not how TVDB wants it, and Plex won’t let you do it that way, either.)

Solution: give everyone the option, via command-line, to enable enterprise data protection.

I opened Copilot at work, saw a green shield, and clicked on it. Enterprise data protection may solve some issues some of you have with Copilot. Not all. For one, it won’t use what you ask to train it. It encrypts the data. It does tell you IT can log your queries. It also mentions it censors results. I don’t like Copilot, but sometimes, it can be useful, in the way that sometimes, Word can do something Pages doesn’t do well. The rift is wider between Excel and Numbers, but I’m an Excel guy. I won’t make the obvious pun. I really do like Word and Excel, but when the price literally doubled and there was nothing I could do (apparently some people were offered a classic version — not me), I just canceled. I was fine paying them $50 or $60 a year for Microsoft 365, even after switching to a Mac, even though Mac never got Publisher (which I also enjoy using). I wasn’t good with $100 a year. So now I just use iWork for free, and I have the benefit of saying my computer does not run any Microsoft software. Or Google, for that matter, though I do use some of their web services.

In an ideal world, macOS or Linux would be the dominant OS. In an ideal world, Amiga woulda never stopped being a thing. (I know it’s still a thing, but really… no it’s not.) It would be Macs and Amigas for regular users and Linux for server admins and uber nerds. (Not that you have to be an uber nerd or even a nerd to use Linux in our world.) That Windows has such a stranglehold is all the more reason to get the hell away from it. Especially with Proton on Linux making gaming more accessible than ever before.

LLMs weren’t trained on every post on Reddit and forums. They focused on long-form comments that prioritised proper grammar and correct spelling. So while I don’t use AI to write my posts and comments, LLMs were likely trained on them, so even though you’re incorrect, I can’t really fault your assumption.

I can’t type like a kid to try to not sound like AI and I don’t want to do that anyway.

I have a Mac, so it has things like WiFi and Bluetooth that most Wintel boxes don’t tend to have. (I used to build PCs. I know those motherboards exist, and what it costs over base to get those features. So I know they exist and why they’re not common.) What it does not have is a camera. My MacBook has one, but any site that wants to use it needs to ask permission first. When I say no, it does not see the camera. It’s not saying “I see camera, can I use it” it’s asking “can I use camera?” An answer of no returns the message “no camera.”

I suspect it’s the same with all platforms. Meaning anyone who wants this can use it and the rest of us will just default to identifying sidewalks to train the cars.

Yes. I am a bit biased and I generally try to decorate biases when they aren’t obvious.

I do admit, I’m a bit older, so Apple was primarily a computer company while I was growing up. They were a bit of a media company before they were a phone company, with the iTunes Music Store. They still are with Apple Music and Apple TV.

To be fair, they run the iPhone like they run the Mac. They don’t allow pack in software, sometimes called shovelware, and including stuff like Facebook and Amazon. Though some say including their own apps counts. I don’t really think so, but I don’t think it’s worth debating. I think their rent seeking and not allowing third party app stores and sideloading is the more interesting criticism, and one I share as well.

The problem is that Apple is getting into services, which is where Google started. And adding ads is the next step and they’ve already begun that.

Jellyfin is fine if you’re an advanced user and you don’t care about streaming outside your network — and your software is made by an AI company (Microsoft) or an advertising company (Google). If it’s made by a computer company (Apple), you have a bit more work ahead of you. Mac users are a minority, so Jellyfin does not prioritise them. Even if you go all-in with ads and AI, you still don’t get remote streaming, which is kind of the point of Jellyfin.

iPhones come in up to 2TB (for the Pro Max) now. I have 512GB on mine, and I have a dozen HD-4K movies (one is actually 1440p) and a few TV shows. I use an app called Outplayer. It’s like VLC but it has folders, you don’t have to have everything in one place like VLC does. (Though, I suppose you can put your files in the Files app and have them open with VLC. But I mean in the app itself you can have folders.) Android phones have similar sizes, though I’m not sure they go up to 1-2TB. I’m not sure though. Older ones can get there with SD cards, but the read/write on those things is so slow, I would hate to move big videos to and from them. Like start that transfer and then go to bed, hope it’s done in the morning without errors.

Plex went from $120 to $250 a few years ago, and they warned people first. No one who had any sense waited for the price increase before buying. Like most others, I paid less. I think I paid $90? Anyway, at this point they’re just going after the whales. There were plenty of sub-$100 deals on Plex back in the day. Those who didn’t see any value in running your own Netflix chose not to pay, and of course they’re not gonna pay more. Plex was worth paying for at $120 or less. I could almost make the case for it at $250. At $750, if you’d told me 10-15 years ago when it was new how much value I’d get from it, I would have paid — and bought more hard drives.

If you do use Apple stuff, you kinda have the best option, but it’s not free, and it absolutely does not work outside your network. It’s called Infuse. First, the price. It’s priced old school, so if you buy lifetime, it’s only lifetime of the current major version. 6 or 7, I think. So when the next one comes out, you can buy at a discount or you can go to monthly. Yearly is actually the best option, it’s $10 a year. That’s not bad. Ten years of it is $100, and paying monthly or yearly means you’re always on the latest version. Considering lifetime is like $60-80, I think it’s a great deal to go yearly. The thing is, Infuse only works with Apple tech, and it’s not a web server and I don’t think you can make it be one. What it does do is catalogue your media and let you easily download to your Apple devices. It’s got some quirks I don’t like. For example, the player will work with a Plex (or Jellyfin) library, but it won’t write back. What that means is, if you’re watching a series on Plex hosted by Plex, you know, it’s gonna update what episode you’re on. Infuse will read that data (say, it knows you’re on episode 6), but it won’t tell Plex what it’s playing, so if you watch 2 episodes on Infuse, Plex still thinks you’re on 6. Infuse clients only talk to Infuse hosts. (Infuse also doesn’t need a host. Just share the files on the Mac using macOS’s built in file sharing feature like any OS has, and Infuse will read straight from that. It’s very smart and robust, and it’s also considered one of the best media players in the Apple ecosystem, rivaling VLC, and that other one that is only on Apple stuff that people love to recommend. I think it’s ugly, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool VLC diehard, so I got no room to talk about ugly software. I just like the one I’m used to.

I don’t think Jellyfin is really good at much of anything but being free. It’s not Plex. It kind of acts like Plex, but it doesn’t do for its users what Plex users consider worth paying for. Infuse doesn’t, either, but Infuse takes a different approach. It’s one that Plex also takes (you download stuff to your device rather than streaming it remotely, which is based on you having an idea of what you want to watch when you’re not at home), but it’s not Plex’s priority and I don’t know about Jellyfin.

That said, Jellyfin does let you edit certain things. For example, both Jellyfin and Plex use The TVDB for metadata, but The TVDB tends to prefer foreign language casts when multiple exist, so if you don’t speak the language, and you don’t listen to that dub, the metadata is kind of useless. The problem is that there’s no source as good as The TVDB that provides multiple dub casts, so the media server apps don’t have the ability to let you pick the cast based on your language preferences. However, Jellyfin will let you manually change the metadata, per show. It takes time, but you can do it. Plex doesn’t let you do it at all.

I do feel for people who are looking at Plex’s $750 price tag, but it’s not like they weren’t warned. Plex users have been promoting the hell out of it for years. Those who thought “it’ll go down” and it more than doubled, and then thought, “oh it’ll go down for sure now” and now that it’s tripling… you kinda gotta lay in the bed you made. Or go build one from scratch. Or use a computer from a company that isn’t based around AI or advertising and find a different way.

Also, I don’t think you can pirate Plex, if anyone’s asking. The server runs locally, but the Plex Pass features are server-based.

What I’d suggest if you don’t like Plex or paying for media server tools is, work on Jellyfin or donate in some way or otherwise contribute to the project. Because at some point Jellyfin is probably going to start charging. So I would “get in on the ground floor” now. Be using it. Be advocating for it. Be contributing to it any way you can. Not just to avoid having to pay if and when they do start charging (I do not know that they will, it’s just my guess), but to make it something worth paying for before (if it does start charging), it starts charging more and you’re back at square one. Because none of us are getting any younger. If you missed the Plex boat, don’t miss the Jellyfin boat. Or get into the Apple ecosystem and pony up for Infuse. (Though, as an Apple guy/Mac guy/iPhone guy, I don’t use or pay for Infuse. I just copy the files over to OutPlayer and play them there. It’s not as pretty, but it works.

Bullshit.

Mankind Divided was hot garbage. The original is a classic, that goes without saying. Invisible War was good, it was just held back by technical limitations (like a forced 30 second load screen every couple minutes). I can explain why people didn’t like Invisible War and why it had to be that way. I have before. But if no one cares, then moving on: Human Revolution was nearly as good as the original. It was at least as good as Invisible War if we set aside the technical limitations.

Cyberpunk 2077 honestly beats all of them. It’s not just prettier. Deus Ex rode the coattails of The Matrix. Cyberpunk 2077 actually starred Keanu Reeves, with Cherami Leigh (Asuna, from Sword Art Online) as the main character, and then Idris Elba (Luther from Luther) as the main character of the DLC. And that’s just the voice talent. The game looked amazing and it still sets the bar for what an action RPG can look like. Whether you call them augmentations, biomods, or whatever Cyberpunk 2077 calls them (I’m a DX purist; they’re augmentations; get off my lawn), Cyberpunk 2077 beats any Deus Ex with the Kiroshi eye implants, the Mantis Blades, the boost-jump legs, and more. And of course you have a real open world. And actual music. Sure, Deus Ex walked so Cyberpunk 2077 could run, but it’s not that games don’t have the same DNA. They’ve gotten better.

Also, the only Deus Ex developer I really care to hear from is Warren Spector. I don’t know who this other person is, but again, Mankind Divided sucked.

Includes spyware from Meta. That’s a deal breaker.