Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.

Jellyfin is the solution if you have a media file on your computer and you want to stream it to your TV in a different room and Bare Bones works fine. It serves my use cases for a lot of things pretty well, but for hardcore self-hosted streaming Plex still has more features and polish

Looks fine to me, I replaced plex like 3-4 months ago

Jellyfin / jellyseer + arr

There are custom themes out there that change the interface.

Right click -> identify-> Title name, has yet to fail me.

Its been a long time since i used plex so I can’t say how much “easier” its over there but compared to the days before streaming this little upfront work takes less time then going to a physical store to rent.

Maintenance takes no work and it cant be enshitificated (someone will just port it)

You need to properly name your media with a proper scheme (including tmdbid/imdbid).