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.
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 use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can’t just “connect”. But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn’t much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can’t just “connect”. But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn’t much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
“tailscale might enshittify in the future” is honestly a poor argument against “plex is enshittified right now”
You must be new here (Lemmy).
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
I also want to make sure that people connecting can ONLY access jellyfin. And I keep hearing about its own security flaws.
I don’t trust people connecting to themselves not be compromised by someone else, for one thing.
Headscale will still work if Tailscale guess to shit.
Yeah I just set up Headscale via YuNoHost recently
So far so good. Might actually consider setting up Jellyfin now that I have a better, and freer remote access solution in place.
Plex is just so goddamn convenient sometimes
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.
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/
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.
I use NetBird and have zero issues.