A setup that I can now heartily recommend (after using it for 6 months) is Apple TV 4k and the Infuse media app[0]
It's able to find your movies and series on Samba shares (and probably other types of locations, too) and categorize, find subtitles, adjust audio and so on.
This assumes you've already got your media somewhere of course (like a file server on your LAN), but I bet 99% of the HN crowd has a home server anyway. And if you use torrents, you can dump the media there.
+1 for the Apple TV mention. I gave up and ordered one to use Infuse, might try out Swiftfin first though, for my Jellyfin setup. It’s always trade offs with the official Jellyfin clients, can’t get everything working 100% of the time with the same setup. I have an Android TV and keep having to switch between LibVLC and ExoPlayer depending on what I’m watching, not to mention the numerous bugs and clunkiness. Like for some reason I can’t wrap my head around, ExoPlayer Jellyfin can’t play ASS and has to transcode the whole file while ExoPlayer Plex can. When you seek before waiting for a previous seek to finish and start playing you end up with a broken stream where the local progress bar and time doesn’t correspond to what’s actually shown on screen. After trying Infuse on my phone, it seems exactly the kind of “just works” I’m looking for.
If you're pirating content, you should retain complete control and security over your setup. How does Infuse enforce its yearly license cost? There must be some telemetry at the very least, which is exactly the issue that got Plex into this situation and why people would do well to avoid it (unless of course you're just watching your own legal copies of media).
It's apple only (tvos, ios, and macos). The yearly subscription is for enabling formats and resolutions, I believe. They don't have a server part. They just scan your sources (smb shares, cloud drives, plex, jellyfin, emby,...) and present a library. My setup is Jellyfin (old Mac Mini with ubuntu server) + Infuse on Apple TV as the player.
It's able to find your movies and series on Samba shares (and probably other types of locations, too) and categorize, find subtitles, adjust audio and so on.
This assumes you've already got your media somewhere of course (like a file server on your LAN), but I bet 99% of the HN crowd has a home server anyway. And if you use torrents, you can dump the media there.
[0] https://firecore.com/infuse?utm_source=hn (you will need the Pro version which is about $15 a year, if I recall. Well worth it!)