I tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes their folder and file structures.
In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.
Another "just share files" user checking in. There are dozens of us!
Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from under you when its developer decides to monetize you.
If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same gripe I have with every other media player system out there: They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I need to add it again to the in-app "library?"
Your filenames can't have colons in them? Sounds like a side-effect of keeping compatibility with 30 year-old Microsoft filesharing protocols. Samba is cool and everything but SMB has no advantages over NFS, SSHFS, or even bind mounts on the same host.
The Windows colon file limitation is annoying, but I've never had trouble with it. Autodetection always seems to work for me, even if the name gets a little mangled (unless tvdb doesn't know about a particular movie/show/season). Sometimes there's a weird extra (year) behind the title because of the way the folder got named, but the metadata itself still shows up right.
Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.
As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not. Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?
Also you can argue that the (original) filename itself is part of the metadata. It's useful to have what it was originally called when referencing elsewhere. So where to put this data? in a sidecar file during the rename process or something? We could just use content hash, but then online dashboards to redownload things from vendors, for example, won't necessarily have that there displayed on the page, or when you start downloading it in the browser.
In case it's helpful for anyone else having the issue: mmv [0] means you only have to run the command once to rename every file. It's pretty fantastic.
Jellyfin is marginally better than Plex, but I also encountered a lot of quirks with Jellyfin which ended in me giving up on it for streaming my media to my other devices.
I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.
I also just share files on the server side and then use Kodi on an Nvidia Shield as the client for watching tv. Works well. I looked at Jellyfin/Plex but didn't really understand what it would offer, maybe if I had multiple tv's and wanted a more shared/transferable experience.
Frankly, you really should be fixing and cleaning the tags with a program like tiny media manager or the like. It improves the user experience vastly, from having cover art, background/preview art, plot overviews, actor / studio lists, and clean, consistent file/folder names.
It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.
In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.
Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1