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Plex & sex
Emby & embrace
Jellyfin & sin
Stream and cream?
You got to learn how to shuck those Western digital drives when they go on sale.
Shucking drives? What part of JBOD did you not understand. Half of them don’t even fit in the case, they are just piled up on top of each other.
🤤
Roughly how much did you get each drive for? I think it’s time I start self hosting but I’ve got no idea where to start. I travel for work constantly and carrying a few externals isn’t a huge deal but it’s not ideal either.
I got these for about $200 each
And that Linus Torvalds poster? I’d be on my knees in an instant. To propose of course.
yeah to propose
thats what i would be on my knees for too
setting up a small jellyfin server for my family instead of getting 32402398423948 subs to shitty streaming companies was the best thing i did
Just don’t talk about the part where we spend ~$1000 on acquiring 20TB of HDD
24TB Seagate drives are on sale for 249 right now, actually a good time to stock up
refurbished drives are great for storing easily replaceable data
I LOVE SELF HOSTING
Love the potrait of Linus Torvalds behind Xenia
What exactly is the point of a Jellyfin server? Wouldn’t it be easier to just like, open the files? Why would that require a server?
You get a cute little user interface to browse through your movies and shows with little posters and information. You also don’t have to use a flash drive and move stuff over if you want to watch from your PlayStation or other device. just a browser is enough.
In addition to the UI others have mentioned, I host mine behind a VPN so all my friends can use it over the Internet, too. It gets a decent amount of traffic every week.
How did you get started with hosting your setup?
Mostly, I’ve been fed up with music streaming platforms recently, and found that Jellyfin also supports my other media cases. I started with Navidrome, but had a computer running Mint already, so I just ran both side-by-side and find I liked Jellyfin better. They both took like 15 minutes to set up; getting my local VPN running and convincing people to use it was by far the hardest part of the setup.
That all said, I’m a software engineer in my day job, so I had a pretty good idea about how to navigate everything.
Are you just giving them a shared login or do you set them all up individually?
Not OP, but each friend gets a different login so that their watch stats don’t get convoluted (Jellyfin does this thing where it allows you to pick up where you left off)
All individual logins. It just requires making an account through the UI, which is pretty quick.
Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate “trickplay” images so you’ve thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don’t end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.
Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don’t Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn’t actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).
If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I’d need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I’d need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that’d only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but… no thanks.
If I can just add to what @glinncor@lemmy.world said:
I personally have one so that I don’t have to mess around with plugging in any hdmi cables and moving my laptop from where it’s docked, I can flick on the server and then it can just be accessed on any tv in the house by anyone.
This is the way. And you can watch from anywhere in the world if you set things up with a VPN.
I did this for a good while but let me tell you, keeping watch progress across devices is a killer feature! I can’t go back.
When I used a folder via NFS I had to memorize my current progress on a episode, then manually open the same episode and seek to where I was on the other device.
With Jellyfin I hit pause on one and play on the other, it’s seamless.
It also shows in-progress and next-up episodes at the top of the homescreen, so resuming playback is just one click.Maybe there’s a plugin to do this in Kodi, but I find it rather clunky on mobile…
So one can watch from a phone, tablet, TV etc.
because it is convenient to access the movies from a smartphone or laptop from anywhere in the house without dealing with the headaches of windows file explorer shitting itself upon seeing a folder with 3000 files in it
I didn’t hear no chill though.
“Jellyfin and put it in”
How’s the barrier to entry for Jellyfin? I just got done investing in Plex when they started changing their payment model
Harder than plex to set up, but not difficult.
If you want to watch outside the network then you’ll need to port forward.
You really shouldn’t port forward Jellyfin. Hell, you really shouldn’t port forward anything. A domain is like a dollar per month. Use a reverse proxy with some sort of login gate like Authentik or Authelia.
If you’re only using it for yourself then there are a lot worse things that people do (like downloading apps for websites, using untrusted VPNs, or even just using the web)
Reverse proxy is more advanced and I think someone who needs it wouldn’t be worried about ease of use.
Just use a tunneling service like tailscale. Easy as fug to set up, and only people who know your credentials can poke about in your server.
If you remember to disconnect machines other than the server from the VPN when not using them and don’t share out the server too much, you don’t even have to spend money.
You don’t even need to remember to disconnect machines you can have a 100 different clients(is that the right word?) on a tailnet. Honestly it’s so sick and amazing it’s free
afaik (and I might be super wrong) you can have up to 100 machines IN the network, but only 3 connected at any given time in the free plan.
But yes, it’s sick and amazing either way.
Nope, free allows for up to 3 users and 100 connected devices. And if you run it on your router, the entire network only counts as one device. So for instance, you and two of your friends could all join the same tailnet. Their business model is basically the same as WinRAR’s; give it to individual users for free, to get people on board. Then charge corporations to use it at scale, since the individual users already know how to use it.
The only reason I don’t personally use it is because my work WiFi blocks outgoing WireGuard connections. And that’s Tailscale’s biggest weakness in my experience; They tout themselves as a zero-config VPN, but that means you’re not able to config things if you need to. If I were able to flip over to OpenVPN or IKEv2/IPSec instead of WireGuard, I’d be fine. But Tailscale doesn’t have the ability to do that, because it would require configuration.
So if you want to watch outside you’re home network, the solution is to blow a hole through your firewall and just raw dog the internet through it? Air out your delicious little jelly hole for the world to see?
I wonder how we teach the kids about VPNs? Clearly their favorite brainrot youchubers/twitchies/tiktogglers nordvpn ads aren’t getting through…
Or reverse proxy, but that’s a bit more complex
Dockstarter with jellyfin + sonarr + radarr + qbittorrent + swag is your friend. I actually found jellyfin easier to setup. Don’t have to worry to much that streams are getting transcoded. Setting swag up was some effort though.
I just use jellyfin, what is all of the rest of those things for?
All of the *arr apps are for automatic media downloading and organization.
You want all the new seasons of a show? Just mark that as a ‘monitored’ show in sonarr. When new episodes are released, sonarr uses your torrent indexer to get the torrent or magnet link and sends that to your torrent downloader. Once the download completes, it renames the file with metadata and puts it into the spot where jellyfin/plex is expecting the file to be.
It’s an automation stack for media piracy.
SpaceInvaderOne has a bunch of tutorials on how to set things up if you want to dive into the full self-hosting ocean.
Very cool, thanks for the explanation!
Maybe this is just me but using a torrent through a CLI is something I have not explored at all, I just transfer files back and forth. Seems very useful
Install the package, chuck files at it, it basically runs itself.
Is there a time investment for scanning and importing my library? That’s where Plex got me, so much stuff to sort and edit metadata after getting started
If your library has sensible file names it’ll do it all for you. If you can export .nfo files from Plex (I don’t know, never used Plex), Jellyfin will scan those too. Just add the library to Jellyfin and forget all about it for an hour or two.
Jellyfin is great if you are only streaming content locally. If you have people outside your network trying to stream, it is more cumbersome to set up than Plex
A reverse proxy is like 3 lines in Caddy, it’s really not hard to set up
- If you’re not behind CGNAT
- If you have access to the router
- If you have a domain
- If you have the understanding to do Caddy/Traefik/NPM
If you’re behind CGNAT I don’t see how Plex will do any better. Same with no router access.
A domain is 1$ per month, which in most countries will be cheaper than any streaming service, or even a Plex subscription for that matter.
Finally, as I said, for Caddy it’s 3 lines, that you can get with 1 word search, and will have 2 substitutions for you to make, one being the previously mentioned domain, the other being Jellyfin’s IP and port. If you’re going the route of self hosting I sure hope a word search is not beyond your abilities.
💍
I’ll show you how hard my drives are.
My QNAP NAS is rapidly approaching 20 years old, I just dump media onto it and then use Infuse as the front end on my Apple TVs.
It does the trick for the time being, but I do want to spin up a HexOS system with a set of 3x16TB drives to eventually replace it.
fuck yeah
I actually did this 3 years ago… and it also legitimately worked.
Yeah I got sick of Plex before it was cool, lol.
Granted, only 15 of the 20 TB was for movies… gotta have some space for a miniature personal archive of selected written works, as well as music.
You know, for the uh… playlist.
Ahem.
