Serviio

Because the Plex TV app no longer works on my samsung TV I am testing Serviio as an alternative because with serviio the native handler on the TV shows a nice graphic interface. However I am struggling a bit trying to mirror some of the features I am used to. In particular Plex makes it very easy to mark individual files and complete folders as "watched" or "unwatched". By searching for programmes using the "unwatched" flag it makes it very easy to see which is the next episode in a series - without being able to do this it is very difficult sometimes to access the correct one quickly. Of course i t may be that serviio only displays unwatched files but if this is the case I need some manual way to mark a lot of files as "watched" right now. I want to avoid moving files to watched folders because this ends up in my back up routine backing up the file more than once.

I would be grateful for any advice about this issue but also if anyone could point me to a comprehensive guide on how to use serviio (particularly for delivery from PC to TV over network)

I'm not home right now, so I'm going from memory here. When you watch an episode from a TV series, Serviio will place an asterisk (*) next to the season last watched, and also the title last watched. But it doesn't block from listing every episode available. Also, I believe there's a category available in the Presentations labeled 'Unwatched', and it will only list titles (unsure if it's only movies or also includes series episodes. I've never used it) that have not been watched.

Curious which Samsung you have that has a nice user GUI. My two Samsung TVs offer nothing but a grid with the title and the DVD cover image. I think it's garbage, but perhaps you have something different.

This is the main support page for using Serviio: http://www.serviio.org/support. If you don't find an answer there or on the Wiki (link on that page) then feel free to ask questions here.

When I said nice I just meant in comparison with what I see when accessing Plex on the TV. The native samsung interface does not show any images just text and I have also noticed that some files are not displayed at all (for no obvious reason that I can determine). The only display difference with servioo is the inclusion of thumbnail cover images, as you say, but I have found that it does display, and plays, all my video files including those missing on Plex.

My question really was how. as a one off exercise, to mark as "viewed" the many films/episodes that I have already watched using Plex.

Where exactly does Serviio put the asterisk - I don't see anything against the file that I watched on the TV last night and I don't see any way to access the serviio database

One thing which does seem annoying is that you cannot apply the filters to view "unwatched" after you have selected "movies", "series" or "Folders" something that you can do easily with Plex

I have Movies and TV series in separate folders with sub-folders for each series so find it is best to navigate using folders as serviio does not always seem to determine the difference between Movies, TV series, music videos or even home videos so when for example you pull up "recently added" or "unwatched" it includes all types of video. Ideally I want to be able to identify unwatched or newly aded videos for a specific series.

It is beginning to look as if I will have to continue using the text based plex interface as the main viewing tool maybe keeping serviio simply to access files that plex refuses to display. I wonder though about computer resource issues of running the two servers, Plex is quite resource intensive unless you set library updating to manual.

Thanks for you comments

Incidentally I have found that I can view both the Serviio and Plex web servers using my TV's browser. However going to the internet browser and selecting a bookmark is not a very intuitive way of doing things and I cannot find any way of inserting a web bookmark as a favorite in the TV's main menu.

The sort of filtering you are desiring is a function of the player, not the server. Same with placing a bookmark. You could do it in Plex because you were using an interface that they created and had control over. Serviio has no control over whatever device you are using for playback. Something like the Unwatched presentation category is the best you can do from the server side.

As to the *, it is only visible when using the Series presentation view. If you look anywhere else (such as Folders or Playlists), there's no *. Also, it only applies to TV episodes, not to movies.

Thanks you are right of course but with Plex I simply use either the browser app or their PC app to be able to mark any file watched/unwatched and even delete files if I need to. However the web app for serviio allows you to do nothing more than find and play files from the server - there is no admin menu in web interface as their is in Plex. I have decided to continue using Plex and navigate it with the DNLA text interface on the TV - it is boring but at least functional. I solved the missing files in Plex they had been accidently marked as watched.

With plex web browser there is a context menu like this for each series/season and individual episode and I was hoping for something like this in serviio web browser - this is only available on the PC and not on device players


Thanks for your help - it has at least reminded me why I moved from Serviio to Plex a few years ago