And it’s easy to share your server with friends and relatives so that they don’t have to go through the same process to watch these shows.
I was sharing my Netflix account with my mom and dad, now that I can’t without paying more, I just pulled the plug on that subscription and add the shows they want to my server.
What is the easy way to share jellyfin over the internet? Portforwarding doesn’t work for me cause I don’t have a static ip address
EDIT: I thank all the answers but none of them seem actually easy
I just use a free dynamic DNS provider (ie: DuckDNS), and most home routers are able to publish IP address changes to that DNS, otherwise you just need a small software to publish those change, which you can do ok the server hosting Jellyfin.
Someone already suggested that but it seems to be missing a step, still need something to direct to the port I have for jellyfin?
You’ll also need to do some port forwarding at the home router level so that external users can reach the server.
You’ll preferably want to do what’s called a DHCP reservation so that your server’s internal IP address remains the same, then do a port forward from
your public port 8096tointernalIP:8096. That way, you just have to point someone outside of your network tohostname.duckdns.org:8096(which will get resolved to your current public IP address) for your Jellyfin server.tried doing hostname.duckdns.org:8096 and it didnt work so Im not sure its supposed to be like that, website mentions something called caddy
The easiest way is to setup tailscale on the server, then share the server with the web interface. Your friends/family simply install the tailscale client, login, and it just connects like magic. No port forwarding or firewall configuration required. There’s plenty of how-tos out there.
There’s no way that’s the simplest solution
Not the simplest to set up, to make accessible, to secure, or for everyone else to use? This solution is a pretty reasonable one considering all four.
You don’t need to do anything for plex
It just streams it straight to their brains?
The issue of dynamic IP addresses is solved using a service like DuckDNS. Space Invader has some tutorials on it: https://youtu.be/CS72kN2c6hU
There is also ddns-updater which I like to use in docker
Purchase a domain and host it with a reverse proxy to your internal net.
You don’t even need to purchase a domain, free dynDNS services (DuckDNS or similar) are good enough for Jellyfin and the like.
Free services always have some kind of dubious hidden product they are selling elsewhere about you to someone else, because network hardware is not free, network system maintenance is not free, internet access is not free. Facebook is free, yet we all know what it’s true cost is.
DuckDNS is run by two guys who are funded by donations. I do agree with what you’re saying about free services but I’m more willing to trust DuckDNS in this case
Heck yeah! Jellyfin FTW!!!
Thank you for giving me just enough curiosity to look up what Jellyfin is. I’ve been wanting to set up a media server but lost interest quick when I realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program. I’m so stoked to give it a proper try.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfin
Website: https://jellyfin.org/
I setup jellyfin plus the arr stack on an rpi4 and man has that little thing changed my life, all the content I could ever want just for the cost of a Usenet provider. Hope you enjoy man!
How’s the rpi4 as a media server? I wanted to do that too, but i looked into it when the 3B was new and the general consensus was that it wasn’t really ideal.
As an aside, raspberry pi’s are so cool. My rpi3b running retropie/ emulation station turned out so great, and it runs way more games than I expected.
realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program
It is still a great media server no mater what the Jellyfin fanclub says. Jellyfin is great, but from a user experience perspective it’s just not in the same league as something as polished as Plex and if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (or you enjoy a good looking and working UI) Plex is the place to go.
I’ve only used Jellyfin, but I struggle to imagine Plex being much easier - it was a piece of piss to just run the installer and point at my folders. Complexity only comes when doing stuff like making it available over the internet.
Or if you want to use hardware encoding. Which Plex manages to setup by itself as long as you have a device capable of it. Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
HW Accel took me 5 min of reading the docs one time several years ago (when I first did the setup several upgrades ago), and has not been an issue since.
You are making some statements about how rough Jellyfin is, you should remember the bolded words from the quote below more often.
Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
You seem happy with Plex, and that’s just fine, but all the experiences you’ve related here about Jellyfin are different than mine, and different than what I typically hear from anyone else who runs Jellyfin in recent years. I was a Plex early-adopter who left Plex for Jellfyin when Jellyfin was barely a year old, and really was still rough around the edges. I still had less trouble then than you are portraying.
My non-techie wife, my teenaged son, and my youngest son with special needs all use it without issue across multiple devices.
I guess I’m in the “Jellyfin fanclub.”
my experience is different so your opinion is wrong
Anyone know how to get subs to work properly on jellyfin, specifically on a Google TV client? About half of my content has nonnembedded subs with the sub file in its own folder, I can’t use subs for those shows, they just don’t appear
AFAIK the subs have to be in the same folder as the video and bear the same name:
s03e01.mp4
s03e01.srt
Okay, thanks to this post I just discovered Jellyfin and though I haven’t even downloaded it yet because I’m on mobile, i tabbed back over here from reading their description page to thank you for this.
I’ve been looking for other solutions but none of them seemed to be incredibly well supported or implemented
Jellyfin is what Plex should be.
I’m still waiting for it to be up to par, I have jellyfin on the server and I check it maybe once a month with the latest version but it still fails miserably with my library.
It’s a very clean high organized library managed by sonarr. All Files are in
“series name (year) > Season xx > series name SxxExx (episode title)”
format and yet it still just fails miserably at matching so much of my content (its a rather massive library) especially on anime. Half the time I have to manually match it, and I have to use the Japanese title in order to pull up the English metadata, because that makes sense.
Playback also just… Fails for no reason on tons of my devices. It’s been getting better recently but until it’s on par with Plex I am not leaving sadly
If it fails on anime maybe someone (such as yourself) needs to do the leg work and set build a database for it to match against?
You know that product you don’t like and have a fine, working alternative for?
You should do hundreds of hours of volunteer work to use the product you don’t like, that way it’s slightly less inconvenient.
The point stands: open source products are only good because people make them good.
If you want to put your eggs in the closed sourced paid basket, by all means go ahead. Plex will still bite you, eventually, just like every other for profit business does.
Okay doomer but my media isn’t going anywhere.
No, and thank fuck for that. I don’t think Plex would end up that bad.
I hope.
Edit: Also it isn’t “doomer” to say that for profit businesses almost always end up screwing their users over eventually. Usually it happens after the business is sold.
Plex has already deprecated the original Android app which had a “lifetime” payment.
Yea, Plex requiring an internet connect just to stream locally tells me all I need to know about them.
I’m not sure why you think that’s the case. I use Plex entirely locally and have never had an issue when the internet was out. In fact my modem went kaput last year and I had a solid 2 days without internet connection. Plex didn’t even blink. The only thing I couldn’t access was Actor/Crew individual pages, as those don’t store metadata locally and are fetched on demand by the client.
I’m pretty sure that if you had not already been signed in, you would not have been able to use it. As the login page requires an internet connection.
so your issue is not that you can’t access the server offline, it’s that you can’t log in while offline?
i have never needed to log in locally since the initial setup. it can also broadcast as a DLNA server which would be trivial to access without authentication.
you’re very opinionated for someone who is totally clueless on the subject.
If I understand correctly, it was originally implemented when they made it so you could use ssl to access your media without any configuration or cost: https://www.plex.tv/blog/its-not-easy-being-green-secure-communication-arrives/
I also think you can watch locally without logging in, but, it’s a less than ideal way of doing it: https://www.plexopedia.com/plex-media-server/general/plex-no-internet/
Unfortunately, the biggest red flag about Plex is that they now offer their own streaming media. That means they’re in bed with media companies which is at odds with the goals and needs of the original fans and users of Plex servers.
When I saw the first slow steps Plex’s encruddification, I was relieved to find out Jellyfin exists. I wish it had more features, but it’s being actively developed and totally usable already. Also, I’m not a fan of the name, but that’s a stupid thing to complain about.
Ooooh…wait… by streaming you mean netflix, etc…
Can we please invent a word for streaming pirated content?
I think it should be streaming.
Netflix etc. should be creaking, like streaming but slower, less content, less pressure, etc.
Plundering, it’s petfect
I hear a lot about Jellyfin, may I ask what it exactly is?
Is it like a library of the things, you have downloaded?
I currently just download shows and put them in folders like “MHA S6” and then proceed to watch with VLC.
It gets even worse when a number of anime aren’t even licensed for your country so you can only stream them via VPN. Looking at you Crunchyroll
Or when Crunchyroll has seasons 2 and 3 of an anime, but not season 1. Looking at you, FLCL.
A huge part of that is season 1 of FLCL is two decades and entire production companies apart. It’s likely entirely down to a matter of how difficult it is to get rights for anime. Cartoon network was involved in the two new HD seasons, and is much easier to deal with that Gainax.
TIL there’s more than one season of FLCL - loved that show back in the day. Is the new stuff good?
Not really
I still think one of the craziest examples of multiplatform streaming being required is from Pokemon. They have a whole guide on how to watch every season:
https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies
Edit: oh, and this is AFTER the death of Pokemon TV, their own streaming service lol.
Unbelievable.
Reminds me a bit about how Weird Al was able to get a whole album worth of music videos funded by spreading them out across various platforms.
But that was clever and creative. This is just goofy.
I finally got jellyfin working and I gotta say the UI is better than Plex in most ways, and it mostly works, but it is just a little glitchy at times. As one example, the auto play next episode feature has never worked in my browser. It will just stay stuck on “0 seconds until next episode starts”. That and for some reason I had trouble getting it setup on my streaming device on the same network… Local hostname wouldn’t work. Said it couldn’t find any servers locally on my network, so I had to use my IP address. So when (not if) that IP changes I’ll have to troubleshoot.
Once they smooth out issues like that, I may ditch Plex even though I paid for it.
it couldn’t find any servers locally on my network, so I had to use my IP address. So when (not if) that IP changes I’ll have to troubleshoot.
One workaround that I can think of is to use ip reservation to give your devices the same ip address whenever they connect. You might find that setting under DHCP on your router. Or just use a static ip on the server.
I’ll try. Unfortunately my ISP showed up to connect my service and claimed I had to use their router so I’m a little stuck with whatever it can do
I’d be very surprised if it can’t do DHCP. If it still can’t, you could always find a cheap router to use as an access point and have DHCP that way.
In that case, you can ask your ISP to set their router to bridge-mode, to disable most of its features, before connecting your own router to it.
I’d encourage you to file a bug report for any issues you have. You are most likely not the only one and it will help all users of the software.
You know what’s nice about Plex? Im not expected to be a free QA for them.
I swear 2/3 of this thread is people saying “Jellyfin is so much better than Plex. You should switch! You just have to do 30 hours of maintenance and another 50 of tweaking and it works almost exactly like the software you already use!!”
Yea I tried jellyfin, but I went back to Plex. Too many specific features on Plex that I got used to, that Jellyfin doesn’t have.
I just go to 9anime, whoever runs that site is a golden god. They got all the anime, a shit ton of manga and it’s all free.
Isn’t 9anime called aniwave now?
I got like 100 sites like 9 anime … They all source their anime and manga from like 5-6 sources … I have so many cos I like trying out new UIs and many of them are quite creative with their website design (I use UBO so no ads or popups tho)
