this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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I want to give you some advice: Use Jellyfin, not plex. It has far deviated to a "hub" for other streaming services and unless you want to have built-in streaming platforms on your home media server, or have plex's own "live tv" service shoved up your rear, I would steer clear.
Jellyfin is pretty lightweight if you're just streaming 1-2 connections at a time, I ran it on a raspberry pi 4 for a while and it was near flawless, only recently have I made a proper VM setup for it.
The only problem is properly exposing jellyfin to the Internet. How do you do it?
I'm not planning on leaving Plex anytime soon. But I did plan on setting up jellyfin in parallel to play with it and learn about it. But this stopped me in my tracks.
I don't want my family to need to VPN into my network. Plex, for as frustrating as it is in many ways, just works. And it works on so much stuff.
I use a reverse proxy with Nginx edit: Jellyfin wiki
Tailscale is what I do. If you make an exit nice they can forever stay on your VPN... I think...
Jellyfin offers HTTPS, you just need to specify a certificate. It's going to be a lot easier to just setup a web server like nginx and expose that to the internet, probably via port forwarding on your gateway/router. In that case, you can get a free certificate from letsencrypt.
So, the basic steps are:
This might sound like a lot of work, but at least you own your data and service. Plex can and will block accounts, rendering servers basically useless.
I run both and most users still choose to watch via Plex. I’d like if Jellyfin took over, but it’s not there yet.
Sorry, why would Jellyfin be different from Plex for exposing to the Internet? Dynamic DNS service / static IP and router port forwarding just like any other self hosted thing. It requires a user/pass to login as usual. VPN is nice but not required.
Plex figures it out itself.
Assuming you don't have CGNAT or any other complications, Plex just works straight away.
So it's not fully self hosted then? I can't see how it would do that without registering you with their own service as a middle man. Seems like that kinda defeats the purpose.
Plex Inc has a central auth server, and your media server automatically creates a dynamic hostname for connecting to your server's IP. And if the user can't reach the server directly for some reason (NAT for example), Plex has a "relay server" that works as a proxy, but your quality gets reduced to like 320p or something.
So if Plex Inc shut down their auth servers suddenly (or have downtime, which happened a couple years ago), you won't be able to do much. It's possible to bypass the central auth, but no one does it, because such auto-discovery is one of Plex's benefits -- user logs in on their app, and it shows all their possible servers. But otherwise, it's self-hosted.
No, it's not fully self hosted.
AFAIK that's exactly what it does.