Found out that to view on the same PC I needed "Plex Viewer" or whatever it's called. WHY? This is a no-brainer on all other products. Yes, I'm sure I could probably have spent several more evenings digging through pages and pages of documentation and learning all about remapping keys or whatever. SHOWSTOPPER: When playing a DVD the chapter +/- buttons on my HP Media Center Remote ("||") don't work. Way too many rabbit holes to get a function to work only to end up with it (almost) working right (some) of the time. I spent about 2 weeks of evenings trying to get it "just so". What astonished me is, for as long as Kodi has been around, how remarkably unintuitive and unpolished it is. I will almost certainly end up buying at least 2 licenses. I've encountered showstopping flaws with the first three, and right now I'm on my 2nd day of trial with JRiver without a single complaint. What I can't figure out it why JRiver was never #1 on an anyone's list. Four names kept recurring: Kodi, Plex, Media Portal 2, JRiver, usually more-or-less in that order of preference. I started by reading various articles with titles like "Best HTPC 2020/2021" etc. I approached this methodically starting when Win7 support ended. Apparently the "Law of Microsoft" is that once a product is perfected it must then be discontinued. User of Windows Media Center but now it's necessary to ditch Win7. Took me better part of a year, on and off.) (Sorry of this is a bit longwinded, but I'd like to document the details of "Why" to save anyone else the time that I spent on this. Customization of almost any part of the library views is incredibly powerful. Extremely lightweight on Windows, works great even on a 7 year old ultra low power Intel Atom based Windows tablet. Runs on any platform I own, + many more I could run it on in the future if I wanted to. (Maybe a transcode/resampled file detection for lossless formats could be implemented in the future?) Analyzing audio files and Dynamic Range, as well as R128 volume levelling. I don't have local music on my mobile devices anymore, because streaming them from my computer running JRiver is so seamless I forget it's not local files. Audio - Recent Albums view is also really nice to keep track of and listen through music I've recently added, and fix tags if needed. ![]() Audio -> Artists -> All Artists view is amazing, it's familiar to how I used winamp for 15+ years, but just so much more features I never knew I needed before. A Dev team who responds to users and takes time to help out fixing issues no matter how weird or difficult. Bit-perfect playback, and DSP showing the audio path in detail Ability to edit the tag data and update the files on the remote computer as seamless as if they were on a local drive, except for album art (feature request maybe?) Remote library from another server computer running JRiver ![]() I was a loyal winamp fan since my computer ran windows 98, but after a friend introduced me to JRiver on multiple occasions I was eventually won over a few years ago, never looked back once I learned how powerful this player is.
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