The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).

But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.

So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.

"Use /* */ for comments, not //."

I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."

EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"

em dashes in the code comments are a good tell

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.

There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.

Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.

Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?

What did the ebook space change into?

Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.

It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.

In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.