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They're not "smart" TVs. They're TVs with shitty android spyware boxes attached.
Stop using that garbage. Don't connect it to a network, just use it as a display.
If you need to watch YouTube on your TV go and grab an OSMC (Kodi-based OS for media boxes) media box. You can get a pre-built one for around $100, or install it yourself on a raspberry pi.
These manufacturers depend on you being lazy and accepting their spyware. You will save yourself so much more headache in the long run if you control your own hardware and software.
Trying to navigate through the world without some minimal knowledge of computers means you're going to get taken by every scam like what Roku is pulling.
It's not just the tvs, they're doing it on their streaming sticks too.
Yeah, every product that they sell will do it.
Using something like OSMC (or buying a Vero is you don't want to mess around with the setup) will let you control what runs on your player.
Until you do that, you're paying some random company while also giving root access on a device in your house and letting them waste your time with ads.
All you get out of the deal is avoiding having to learn how to use a new piece of software. A Pyrrhic victory due to the fact that you have to learn to use Roku.
I'd rather spend a few hours learning how to setup Kodi. It's free software, you don't pay for it and it's Free software, you control it with no strings attached.
My big issue with kodi is that i like my media library to be human navigable and named and it does not. Dealbreaker
Kodi doesn't organize your media, you use other applications for that (tinymediamanager, sonarr/radarr, etc).
The default library layout, for Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi is very human navigable, for example TV Shows are in this format:
There may be a few extra files in the directories depending on what metadata you're storing and what you're pulling from the Internet, but it is organized and navigable.
aight, I never said that Kodi organises media, if it tried to, I would shoot it on sight.
I organise my media, ebcause it's media I've decided I want to keep and organise accordingly. Kodi has very specific requirements and cracks the shits if you don't give it exactly what it wants. If that fine for you, then that's fine for you. That is not how I roll
how I do roll:
-> \fileserver
--> Sci fi series
---> Babylon 5
----> 1.01 - Midnight on the Firing Line
----> ...
----> 2.01 - Points of Departure
etc etc etc.
I've played with a translation file so Kodi's file scrapers can understand that X is Y and react accordingly, but it's very "my way or the highway" and I don't bow to a machine. When it refuses to even acknowledge the existence of a file (as in just display the file name, not necessary with any metadata) unless it can jam its thumb up there, I'm out.
I understand, I used to manually organize my own files as well.
When I'm given the choice of user interfaces. Choosing between a file browser and something like Kodi, Plex or Jellyfin seems pretty easy, to me.
Even with the most organized file system, a file browser just isn't a good UI for a media player interface. No user tracking (watched episodes, saving progress or playlists), for example.
That being said, everyone's use case is different. There isn't a "right" way, but in a multiuser environment across multiple types of devices with non-technical users it's much easier and feature rich to simply use Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin.
Trying to setup direct access to the file system of a media server which could be accessible by Android/Apple phones, video game consoles, smart TVs as well as Linux and Windows clients would be more complex than just using a media interface and a standardized media directory structure.
ok. Please stop trying to convince me to change to something I do not want to.
I stated my issue with Kodi. If there's no solution to that issue then it's a dealbreaker, like I said.
I'm not trying to get you to change anything. You can organize your media however you like, I'm mostly just setting up the solution:
The solution that you're looking for is called filebot (https://www.filebot.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7). In filebot you first define how you name your media and what directory structure you'd like to use. You can use it to handle ingesting new media. It will read common naming schemes used on files often shared online and re-name them into your defined directory and filename structure.
In addition, it comes with bindings already setup for the 'plex' format (that Kodi and Jellyfin also use) so you can, once you've defined a format to match your preferred directory structure, use filebot to hardlink your media library into a different Plex-compatible structure. Since you're using hardlinks it won't use any additional disk space.
Then you can keep your media how you always have it, have a powerful tool to handle managing that library (for example, you could define a new format and it can move the files between them) and also hardlink the files in a Plex folder structure which will let you have access to a media player interface.
If you manage any media at scale you should learn how to use filebot in any case, manually organizing a library can be tedious and take a while. Filebot is a lot faster once you learn it.
e: Also, if you ever run into a media collection that is already in a plex folder format, you could use filebot to re-organize it into your preferred directory format. It works on music as well and can use ID3 Tags or, if they're missing, AcoustID audio fingerprints. TL;DR: Use filebot