I went through plex and emby but i finally settled for jellyfin. It has just what i need, a pleasant and minimal interface and it has a light footprint on my rpi. plus is free so no plex premium bullshit stuff.

Lots of Jellyfin love in here, love too see it. The sever end of is great, the client end though… not so much. If you are just looking for a plug and go, plex has the maturity of their clients with a very workable backend. just about every device out there as an up to date official plex app, right down to a windows app if you really want it.

Again, no shit on Jellyfin here, Plex is a business after all.

My setup is ghetto AF. I just run a Linux server with a minidlna service and samba running.

Any browser on my network can access //server and see my collection of videos.

To be clear, this meets your requirements 😎

I use vlc on my phone, my tv can browse it all natively, my gf can access it on her iphone. This server is part of my windows NAS.

(In case anyone is wondering, every time my main PC is idle for 20 mins it runs a sync between the server and a backup drive I have attached to my main PC, so it’s all duplicated for a hot-swap whenever I need. It’s amazing how low tech and resilient my setup is)

I have been messing around with jellyfin as a replacement to my plex server. It seems nice tho the number of natively supported clients is small, it’s web client does fill in some of the gaps. I have been using Plex for years though and it has been amazing I’m just afraid of the direction the company has been heading in.

+1 for Jellyfin. Been running it for years now and it’s fantastic. Great device coverage

Plex and Jellyfin are good and all, but you know what’s better?

UPNP - simple, efficient, effective. I recommend Gerbera.

Man, all this talk makes me miss AirStream. Only worked on Android, but it locally-streamed just about everything out of the box; combined with MX Player, transcoding wasn’t even necessary. But the devs vanished like 7 years ago and stopped updating/supporting the server software, so getting the app to communicate with the host computer was impossible.

Also using Jellyfin and it’s great.

Regarding the number of different clients, yes they have less than Plex but remember Jellyfin is a free product and is a considerably younger project so more clients will come in time.

I run a Jellyfin add-on with my Kodi setup and it runs great and streams to three of my mother’s LG TVs, one uses a web client as the official client hadn’t been signed off by LG, another uses the official client (LG run multiple versions of their WebOS) and the third runs the official client on fire stick from the Amazon app store.

I use Kodi and a Samba share. Easy peasy.