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.
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
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.
Tailscale truly could not be easier/simpler.
Not for all clients, like Roku for example.
Yes the solution is different hardware, like a Google TV, older firestick, raspAP, or flash openwrt on a router. But that’s no longer plug and play and may have other caveats. Besides costing money.
No shade, it’s just not QUITE that simple every time.
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.
Yeah docker isn’t the isolation sandbox some people make it out to be. It’s not meant for that. You very well may have a setup that’s meant for that but it’s more than I’m willing to expose.
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
How does Plex get around that? I’ve only ever used jellyfin.
If you can spin up a podman container, you can use a caddyfile. Hell, if you can nano and read, you can set uo a caddyfile.
Side question here: how big is your storage pool for those of you that runs a jellyfin server?
I just started a Jellyfin server, but with the current hdd prices, it fills up fast and I need to manage my library a lot more than I’d like
I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.
I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.
If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.
4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I’ve only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I’ve got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.
3 x 16Tb Seagate disks. One is for parity. So around 29Tb of space. Got them used about 2 years ago.
When you got them, how many hours were they at?
The HDD I see around me have 60k hours ++ so I am a bit frisky considering what they ask for
I think around 20.000 hours or about 2+ years.
I got the Plex lifetime pass like 10 years ago, but just switched to Jellyfin over the weekend. It felt like every week Plex was asking me to re-pick my home page list and just insisted on re-adding their live streaming junk. Got tired of it. Reverse proxy is not hard to set up, and while there’s some encoding kinks to work out, it’s not like Plex was immune to those problems either.
The best part is that, if you’re on the fence, you can just run both. That’s what I did at first, but I’ve since let plex die.
I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don’t have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
So you have wireguard connecting to the VPS and a port open on the VPS for the jellyfin client to connect to?
Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.
I wrote about my setup last month; https://the.unknown-universe.co.uk/home-lab/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/
Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video
From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I’ve had no issues. I am the only user of my network.
If it’s just you using it setting up VPN is an easy solution. I just use wireguard. If you have a pic you can run pivpn which is just wireguard.
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
I’ve been considering audiomuse, but I have old equipment available.
My options are my media server, which is an old Xeon E3-1275v3 with 32G of RAM, which also hosts Navidrome, my arr stack and the associated downloaders, or my Home Assistant and Jellyfin box, which is a Lenovo M700 Tiny which is an i5 6600T but has only 8G of ram.
Or, an 8G Pi5 with an SSD (using the pi SSD hat)
I’m not sure either of those 3 options would handle audiomuse AI all that well…
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
——
Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
That’s cool to know, however the Xeon runs FreeBSD, so I would need to create a VM if it doesn’t work in Linuxulator, (FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, works sorta like wine does)
I have 120k tracks. I like music.
I should do some research this weekend I reckon.
Great, now I have one more thing I gotta do this weekend. Thanks a lot. Lmao.
So.
I did a thing.
I have audiomuse-ai running its main, complete docker compose script, with all containers, on my 8GB Raspi5, and worker-only containers running on:
- An 8GB bhyve VM on my FreeBSD box
- An E2-6110 AMD pre-ryzen APU with 16GB of ddr3
- A Ryzen 5800x w 32GB RAM
They’ve been running about a week, and I’m a little over a third of the way through
Once the initial analysis is complete, I’ll stop all worker containers and leave it all just running fully on the pi5.
I also created a worker-only addon for the 6600T machine, but as it is already running HAOS and Jellyfin, I was getting a lot of OOM-related failures when it was running.
But I also have 32G of used, eBay bought, ddr4 SODIMMs.coming for it.
Bonus: Most of my homelab is in this. The only things missing are my Sophos running OPNsense, and the raspi5. Oh, and my actual desktop machine.
Yo, that’s awesome!
Pro tip for you, ASR (whisper - lyric detection/transcription) can be kind of bad, but if you have some spare resources, it takes very little to host a local LRCLIB database and clone lrclib.net (they have a GitHub page). This massively speed up lyric analysis for me using the API against a local site instead of getting 429s against lrclib.net or relying on ASR.
Lyrics are the biggest longest part of the scans. My whole collection was like 3+ weeks with lyrics stuff on, but only 2 days with just MusiCNN and CLAP.
I was bored. I’m not running it in a docker VM any more. I am now running it directly on FreeBSD using podman and FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer.
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
Lol ‘i didnt rage quit and post about it’
‘I rage quit amd wrote a blog about it’
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you’re getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
I appreciate these tips. I’m gonna save this comment for the next time I circle back to Jellyfin.
I started with jellyfin a month ago and I miss nothing. Total newbie, used free chatgpt to set everything up. I can access from anywhere.
The only thing I haven’t done is to get the app to the Hisense tv so I use through a browser. Just didn’t have time yet, not sure how that works.
Funny timing, I’ve been playing with Jellyfin lately too and I ended up forking a little project to bridge Plex into Jellyfin: https://github.com/ndieschburg/xtream-to-strm-web
It syncs your Plex.tv libraries (even shared servers you don’t own) into .strm and .nfo files, so Jellyfin just picks them up as a normal library and you can watch everything from any Jellyfin client. There’s a built-in proxy that hides the Plex tokens from the STRM files, and for clients that don’t follow HTTP redirects (like Findroid) there’s an HLS proxy mode so it still plays fine.
Still a bit rough but it does the job if you want to keep a single Jellyfin frontend and still reach the stuff that only lives on Plex.
I was using Synology’s video server software. They had an app for android and IOS. Then Synology killed it and the only options were plex or Jellyfin. I bought into Synology because of their remote connection options. When I tried Plex they were making me pay per connected device. No way! Jellyfin became my only option at that point.
There’s also Emby. And some other options.
You dont have to pay Plex per connected device, but you do have to pay something somewhere for remote streaming.
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hmm I wonder if it’s because of the recent subscription hike … hmmmm
intense HMMMM
