User experience

Is there more to them than just looking nice?

We’ve already established that most of these projects feature a pretty interface, but we won’t fault you if you still wonder whether these media servers are like fireworks: pretty to look at, but offering nothing of real substance.

A traditional home theatre setup comprises a large screen, impressive speakers and perhaps most importantly, a vast collection of movies and TV shows. On Blu-ray, of course! Which is why you shouldn’t think of media servers as glorified home theatre systems. Unlike the rather restrictive use provided by the latter, media servers such as these are capable of so much more.

With their feature set, it’s important for these projects to find the right balance between utility and ease of configuration. It’s also important to not alienate any class of user, merely on the basis of their familiarity and expertise with Linux or handling multimedia files.

Gerbera 7/10

The Gerbera web interface expects you to manually select the directories or individual files you want to import into its database. Depending on the type, the server automatically lists them under the Photo or Video category. Although it also supports online streaming content, you’re expected to manually create a web.conf file to access this feature.

There’s a surprising lack of documentation on the subject, except for a sample file. The web interface provides access to limited documentation that provides a quick rundown of various configuration options, but it’s by no means aimed at novice or newbie users.

Built on top of Media Tomb, Gerbera has the potential to grow into a popular media server, but in its current state, it will only appeal to those who have tried the other projects, and now want something which they can customise from the ground up.

Jellyfin 7/10

This project began as a fork of Emby, which is mentioned in the ‘Also Consider’ section of this Roundup. All the projects prefer a certain naming convention for your media files, so as to better display them in the graphical interface.

While the files will still be displayed regardless of their directory structure and filenames, Jellyfin will be unable to impress you with features such as classifying your TV shows into different series unless you follow these conventions for naming.

Although it doesn’t have as many plugins to offer as Kodi, or even Plex and Universal Media Server, installing the limited offerings is child’s play with Jellyfin. Our biggest complaint with it, however, is that it identifies many JPG images as media files. Although it displays a thumbnail for these images, it’s naturally unable to display the files.

Kodi 9/10

In contrast to the other servers that each provide a web interface to stream your content, Kodi is a desktop environment in itself. Another major difference between Kodi and the others is that it isn’t designed to stream media over the network. Instead, it’s designed to play local content and excels at organising different file types. With a vast array of add-ons at its disposal, you can quickly have Kodi perform on par with the others.

One of the primary reasons for Kodi’s popularity is its ease of use, and intuitive interface. The ‘10-foot’ user interface works well with traditional TVS as well as projectors and and can be navigated using a TV’S remote control.

While many projects support the use of external subtitles with the media files, Kodi can also be used to fetch these, and even tags and other metadata for your audio and other media files.

Plex 7/10

There’s no denying the utility and ease of use of Plex Media Server. Unfortunately, its business model gets in the way of popularity. Many features which one would normally expect from a media server, such as streaming content to an Android device, are severely restricted unless you buy a subscription. Video playback is limited to one minute if you opt to use the Android device without purchasing a monthly or yearly Plex Pass. Similarly, the Live TV & DVR feature, freely available in the other projects, is only offered to Plex Pass subscribers.

It sports a slick interface, and unlike the others makes it quite easy to access online news channels, podcasts and web shows, without having to manually hunt for these yourself. This easy availability of online content makes Plex an ideal choice for users who don’t have a collection of media files of their own.

Universal Media Server 8/10

As with Kodi and Plex, Universal Media Server makes it quite easy to tweak settings. But while the others let you do it from the web interface itself, you must use the administrative tool to make all changes. While the web interface can be accessed from any machine on the network, the administrative interface runs locally on the server. The panel is easy to navigate and offers a number of helpful tooltips, which is a practice that the other servers would do well to adopt.

With the right configuration and plugins, UMS can fetch artwork and other metadata for your media files from online sources, and also uses mplayer to create thumbnails for your videos. Its biggest drawback is the lack of a centralised plugin browser, which means you must troll through the forum board to determine if there’s a plug-in for a feature that you might need.