I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into "smaller" instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can't remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
Similarly, Calibre for ebooks. I set it up to use my Google Drive (so I can automatically sync between my various computers) and have never looked back.
I use it too, wouldn’t call it better than audible though. IOS beta app is not great.
I don’t use iOS, so your mileage may vary. The android App works fine.
I haven’t even heard of this and I don’t use audible, but I know how popular audio books are these days, can you break down the benefits of it?
It looks more consistent, has a simpler UI, has a series-feature that is actually useable and doesn’t link to an embedded website for almost everything.
And it can be used as a podcast app as well.
Con is that you need to bring your own audio books. But you can download them from Audible and such with many programs that are just freely out there on GitHub.
Also it can do podcasts, and even ebooks (the ebook support is pretty rough, I don’t recommend it yet, but the developer is updating at a crazy pace).
I love this one. I still download the books locally and use a local app to listen, but its a wonderful manager.
Honestly, no. It’s objectively worse. It’s not bad, but by far not as good.
Interesting. I hate Audible because it redirects you to the stupid embedded website for almost everything and tends to get effed up when listening with multiple devices.
Audible isn’t perfect either, but for the library and listening part it’s better (for me, at least, but maybe I’m just too basic).
I hate Audible’s library. I listen to series of books mostly and keeping them that way has been shoehorned in only recently with audible. What so you like more about the listening part?
Well, that’s just not my use case, so I don’t have this problem.
For me the playback just seems a bit more refined. Audiobookshelf is a bit buggy for me.