After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
This article doesn’t mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
Someone breakes in, then moves laterally to your home assistant running frigate to watch you sleep at night. Then uses your residential uplink as a proxy to resell on an open market.
After that, the possibilities are practically endless.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
This article doesn’t mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
A reverse proxy is a trick? That’s like standard practice for web servers.
Tailscale truly could not be easier/simpler.
Just fucking yeet it online
expected advice from typical JF users.
What’s the worst that can happen. Someone watches your movies
Someone breakes in, then moves laterally to your home assistant running frigate to watch you sleep at night. Then uses your residential uplink as a proxy to resell on an open market.
After that, the possibilities are practically endless.
It’s a rootless container. Chances are they are not going to do any of that.
Things are on the internet all the time.
Yup! That’s the worst thing that can happen. Now would you be so be kind as to send us the link to your private unsecured Jellyfin server?
I’m tempted to. But I’m not. Just because I dont want to fox my domain here.
Is running in a rootless podman container. I’m confident
You’re right, I missed that.
I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
There are a ton of reverse proxy options that manage the cert for you
There’s lots of reasons I don’t want to set this up
If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
My mom lives 900 miles away and she can barely turn a computer on
What in the goddamn fuck, sir
Step 1) Install tailscale (headscale also exists if you wanna fully self-host it)
Step 2) Done, solved
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
How do you go about doing that?
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
Can’t you just setup a dyndns and port forwarding?
Yes, and if that falls within your risk tolerance it’s rather easy to set up.
Most of the people in the discussion here don’t want to open a port to the internet.
How does Plex get around that? I’ve only ever used jellyfin.
Plex operates TURN servers
That’s why I’m running both. I use jellyfin, everyone else uses Plex 🤣