P.S. MediaBrowser3 has come a very long way in the last few months and at the current rate of development it should overtake Plex pretty soon (in many ways it already has). And best of all, the developers actually give a crap about their users.
I agree, I don't think it's any secret that I've been playing with MB3. Here's a high level "score card" of my complaints from the OP message in comparison
SYNCING:
MB3 has it designed from the ground up to work exactly how Plex users wanted it to work. It only synces what it needs to. Can sync in the background or foreground. Actually transfers the watched status so it really is a "sync". Has the option to bypass transcode and use the original file to make syncing much faster.
Will be rolled into other clients once everyone is satisfied SYNC works and handles all usual sync scenarios properly.
Con: In alpha testing right now for windows 8.1 client only but server code is done (obviously). Just about ready to go beta for wider testing.
HOME and FILTERING:
Filtering on MB3 does both positive and negative filtering. It's also simpler to use. For the "positive" filtering you don't have to select every tag, but instead just choose the highest level. So for example if you choose "R" content it knows that G, PG-13, PG-17, etc are covered.
You can tag files (or groups of files) and then use these specific tags in a negative filter.
MB3 doesn't rely on a "plex pass" type feature to keep track of "home or friend" users. Instead all users are setup locally on the MB3 server itself. You can grant quick login privs to the user. Quick login is equiv to Plex Home user.
You can also link an account on your MB3 server to a MediaBrowser3 username if you wanted so you could have different userIDs on many different servers linked back to one master account but it's optional and only for convenience. You can still always directly login to any specific server.
No need to send "invites" for each server if linking to a master account as the access is just granted.
POLICY CHANGES:
Development road map is spelled out and you know what is being worked on and by whom. You are free to run the release, beta or dev builds. So you can run the latest/greatest code compiled just minutes before if you want to help test features as they are being developed. It's up to the OP which version to run.
It's the difference between open development vs closed door development. Reminds me of early Plex days. Of course the source code is available and easy to work with so any dev can jump in and help.
SERVER MANAGEMENT:
MB3 has some of the same faults as Plex. You can't limit the number of streams or control who can or can't transcode or from what IPs they can use. You can however, setup scheduled times a user can use your system. This could allow you to blackout "prime time" or limit your child's use during homework time for example. You can also put a user on temporary hold so they can't use the system.
You can have multiple admins of the system and can grant access to libs for even the admin accounts. So you can have those "annoying" libs setup for family (reality TV Shows, piff...) and be able to manage them BUT NOT SEE them yourself!!! I like this because I can also setup libs for holidays and seasons. Think Christmas, Val Day, Easter, Mem Day, 4th of July, etc and have the libs populated but not seen (by anyone) until the right time of the year comes around. Can't do this in Plex as the Admin ALWAYS see's all libs.
MB3 allows users to download files (I asked them to add this and they did) and of course control this through the admin portal. So if your Dad, Mom, Daughter, Son is going on a trip and they want to take a few movies/shows with them for offline viewing it's easy! Soon they will also have SYNC but for now users can be granted d/l access to the native media for offline viewing.
MB3 allows you to use http and https. You can also use your own cert if you like. Security is much better implemented than Plex at this point in time.
MB3 Strengths:
It supports other types of media besides just video and music. You can have:Movies, Music, TV/Series, Live TV, Books, Games, Home Videos, Music Videos, Photos and Mixed Content. MB3 handles "personal" videos much better than Plex. For example my NFL, NCAA and Learning libs were picked up and work out of the box without the need for 3rd party scanners/media agents. It setup the libraries with folders as "shows names".
The "Mixed Content" type works great for things like Documentaries or Concerts where they could be listed in Plex as either a show or a movie.
MB3 fully supports "Collections" out of the box. So instead of having multiple listings for Star Trek you have 1 listing with all the individual movies under it in order of release. You can fully control this or have the system manage your box sets or collections (do you want it to show 2, 3 or 4) as the minimum for example.
MB3 doesn't have as many native clients as Plex but probably supports more devices. That probably sounds strange so let me explain. As an example there currently is no xBox One client. However since it's UPnP/DLNA compliant the software sees this device. So from any other client (web, phone, etc) you can "cast" to the UPnP/DLNA client. Think "Chomecast" for Plex and you get the idea! Many devices like WD Live, Blu Ray players, etc suddenly become "casting" devices for use by MB3.
MB3 has some nice touches like "Next Up" to see the next episode of each series you are watching. Or the next movie to be played in a movie collection.
KILLER FEATURE is Live TV integration. This was the feature that pushed me to try MB3. It doesn't do Live TV itself but integrates with other software. However, this is built into MB3 and doesn't feel like a 3rd party plug in. I have MB3 talking to WMC and it works fantastic. Through admin panel I can grant who can and can't delete media, who can schedule recordings, etc... This feature alone is worth the look if you have a capture card.
MB3 supports shared channels. Unlike Plex you can share indivual channels (like libraries) with users and set age restrictions or permissions to the channel. Downside is that there are very limited channels available at this point in time. So the architecture is there but the "content" is not if you will.
MB3 has recently added Roku trick play functionality. It's not quite as seemless (not really harder) as Plex but is more powerful. You can choose to generate SD, HD bifs or any combination of the two. You can choose to store BIF files in a "meta-directory" or right along side your media. For me this is truly awesome as I don't want this in a meta directory but right along side my media. Once BIFs are generated they can easily be imported into the system which is very cool if you ever have to reload a library or want to move your setup to a different computer. All meta data can be handled this way. This also makes it much easier to have multiple servers pointing to the same content as they can share this meta-data.
TrackIt functionality is built it and works very clean for all users if granted permission to use it.
MB3 fully supports STRM files (Plex used to but dropped support). For those that don't know what they are. It's a text file on your file system with an extension of strm. It contains a link to a file external to your server such as: http://host/path/streamor mms://host/path/stream or rtsp://host/path/stream You could use this functionility to build up a hude learning library for example where content is streamed from freevideolectures.comm yahoo, youtube, etc. The library would appear to be on your server but the content is streamed from elsewhere.
STRM files work really cool for files uploaded to the cloud. Instead of having to "cloud sync" your media you can use the tools you feel most comfortable using to get your media to the cloud, then as long as there is an "eternal/shared" link to this media you can build an STRM file pointer. BINGO, cloud sync done your way using tools outside of the server!
MB3 Weekness:
Just like Plex it uses SQLlite as the database so you can't easily access the database from outside MB3 nor can you have multiple servers pointed to the same database. (boo)
Searching in MB3 sucks for now. EVERYTHING is a "global" search. By this I mean it searches your movies, shows, pictures, music, etc and brings back one giant list of everything that matches. There is no "section searching". So a simple search like "Top Gun" on my system gives me a long list due to all the music tagged as "top" or "gun". For this "Top Gun" search I got back 30 entries. My normal and my 3D version of the movie with 28 music entries. I have not tested searching across shared servers at all. For now I'd have to say Plex is much better at searching but this should be rather trivial from a development standpoint that I think it's just a matter of time. This one caught me off guard and I was really surprised searching worked this way in MB3.
No easy way to update just one library. At present it's an all or nothing update. Of course it can watch the file system for updates which works great if the media is local but not so great on many NAS devices. This will be taken care of in a later update. Not a deal breaker but not as convenient as Plex where you can just update TV Shows and not your movies or music libs. With that said however, for me when I add new media to my folders 9 out of 10 times it shows up in MB3 before Plex with no user interaction.
Transcoding:
MB3 uses ffmpeg sort of like Plex does. It's not as clean as Plex however but works slightly differently. I won't go into details but will say it works OK 80% to 90% of the time. It serves up both mp4 and webm content via ffmpeg. On some transcodes in Chrome you can't seek (no rw / ff) if the file is transcoded which is BAD. It's on the TO DO list but for now doesn't always work.
Another downside to MB3 transcoding is the way it's implemented. When someone starts to play a file that requires transcoding it starts the transcode and just goes "balls to the walls" until it finishes transcoding the file. The implementation in Plex is superiour as it can process only enough to stay ahead of the client and can jump ahead to a different point in the media and start transcoding from there. Plex's implementation with it's "throttleing" can support more users transcoding at the same time in theory. This is an area of the code I'm looking at and plan to contribute if possible.
CLIENTS:
I have not spent much time with the different clients. The windows 8.1 client is shaping up nicely (alpha tester) and the new Android client is going to be killer but other than those two I haven't played much. The Samsung TV version sucks compared to Orca's and I haven't played with the Roku version yet. But for me I don't really care that much as I like being able to "cast" to my Samsung TV or cast to the xBox One.
I would say at this point in time most "energy" has been spent trying to make the server as powerful/feature rich and bug free as possible so that the clients could be built afterwords. Does that make sense?
So from a high level "apples to apples" comparison, MB3 is superior in a number of ways but also lacking in some very common ways such as searches and "polished" clients. I do not have nearly (not even close) as much time on MB3 as Plex so I'm sure I haven't come across all the short coming in MB3 like I have with Plex. I have 2 Plex servers in "production" compared to 1 MB3 server in "testing" so nothing above is from "real-world" testing of MB3!
Carlo
