Multiple users in the May 10, 2026 Plex-versus-Jellyfin thread on Hacker News surfaced a distinct unmet need that gets drowned out in the migration noise: both Plex and Jellyfin insist on imposing a metadata ontology on your files, and a real chunk of self-hosters just want a browser-accessible, transcoding-capable, watched-state-tracking player pointed at their existing directory tree. Think of it as a personal Plex for people who already organize their files better than Plex would.
builder note
The trap is feature creep back into being a library manager. The whole point is that the data model is 'the filesystem' and the state is 'a sqlite of (user, file-hash-or-path, watched-position)'. Ship it stupid, with FFmpeg transcoding and a phone-friendly web UI, and resist every issue request that asks for a poster wall.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
The category currently splits into 'library-first, you must conform' (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby) and 'file-server with a player on top, no state' (Filebrowser, h5ai, ad-hoc tools). Nothing splits the middle: respect my folder tree, track per-user watched state at the file path level, transcode on demand to a phone, done.