[unclefester]

Hello!
My situation: years and years of perfect hifi liquid music with RaspberryPi-OSMC-Kodi. TBs and TBs of .flac files (about 10-12.000 albums), Musicbrainz tagged, and almost perfectly categorized by Kodi very fast (from scratch about one night... so no need for me to save the library in case of reinstalling or system change). All controlled headless with Yatse on my smartphone, ultrafast combination and really functional, almost perfect.
Recently I bought a Raspberry Pi5 (in this moment with Libreelec, testing with MariaDB, all super fast), and I was planning to use the old Raspi Pi3 (now unused) for my bedroom with another analog stereo. Since it becomes a distributed system, I thought: "maybe it's better to switch to Plex, for its client server system... if I connect 2 systems, probably I'll share the same library in the blink of an eye". I know in theory how to share Kodi, but Plex more straightful way to achieve that was intriguing me.
So just to try I set up a Plex installation on my notebook (Win11, brand new, Intel 13th Gen, very powerful), I connected my 2 5TB USB disk drive with all my collections (actually the 2 backup drives) and started to scan the library (using MB tags). After some time evidently the library started to become too large (or something like that) and the interface became almost unresponsive. Even Yatse, connected to Plex (I've got the complete version) wasn't able to display anything and gave errors (after a correct initial connection).
I know that Plex uses a lot of internet network because of the client server system... I've got a fiber copper mixed, about 30MBits.
For whatever reason, the system became partially unusable, completely different from Kodi while scanning libraries. So I'm quitting the new project and sticking to Kodi
Someone else that had a similar experience?

Thanks in advance
Alex

[williamowens]

I think Kodi is faster than Plex.  I've used it to play files stored locally on the network that Plex struggles with.

[DJ_Izumi]

I like that Kodi has no 'dependence' on the internet other than things like scraping or the YouTube addon.  And if push came to shove I could even write my own NFOs from the tools I have.

This means that the internet could 'disappear' and my home Kodi setup will continue to work without issue.  Even though Plex is capable of operating 'offline' for a while, it still depends on remote internet login servers and more for management, it will eventually require the user to login again and they'll be SOL without internet.

Similarly, I use Kodi on a Steam Deck with a transcoded, low bitrate, offline library stored on the MicroSD card.  I've been at 36 000 feet on a plane or hundreds of kilometers from the nearest cell tower on a remote Canadian train and it 'just worked'.