Selfhosted

Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.

Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There's even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !

How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don't have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it's done, not everything shows up.

it will still shows stuff in the library even if it failed to pick up the metadata.

for jellyfin, folder structure is kinda important for auto detection to work.

For shows, you can organises your files like this:

series-name-a/
    season-01/
        episode-01
        episode-02

You can check out the doc, it is more detailed

If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.

You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.

You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.

Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.

If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.

Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)

If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.

In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.

I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.

Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.

It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.

You might just be able to point jellyfin to your media directories and then let it scan them.