From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

This all feels like it should be 800x less of an issue because phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.

Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.

The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.

https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider

Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.

> phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.

This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.

Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.

Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.

Phones and tablets can access windows shares just fine. You just need a file manager that supports it. Regardless, direct playing files from a share, doesn't come close to matching the UX a media server provides.

Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.

SMB has been a huge transmission vector for viruses over the years, that's why some ISPs block it by default (its security is terrible).

And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").

Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.

(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)

> Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.

Is this a problem? I feel like this reputation is 10 years out of date.

Personally I use smbd & I am not afraid for it. I'd like to tell Windows users the dame, provided I trust them to disallow all but logged in users.

Dlna works really well for me... on linux with a PlayBin media renderer. Which will support essentially any media thrown at it. I've definitely found tv's and sticks to be very hit or miss eith codecs, need transcoding too oftenm But dlna worked pretty nicely when I used it with a competent media renderer.

The appeal is being able to have some network connections to other people's media servers too. Making the media server less of the primary focus is a shift, & handling media-providers as replaceable modular systems would be a step up, & is essential for group-usage to evolve; something we technically cant really do effectively now.

I do very much see your point that Jellyfin has a lot of good capabilities for media-watching. I'm stillfeeling strongly like media providing/serving is a different role tham media consuming, that many of these responsibilities could shift to a more local-centric android or tv app that expects you to have used general file sharing systems to coonnect up.

Good discussion thanks. Shout out to the other mention of transcoding, which definitely plays a part too. Setting up a fuse mount to transcode your stuff to a given quality & them file-sharing that too would be doable & still "generic" versus a specific media-sharing system like this, but yeah, it's more into the cobbling stuff together realm.

>Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard

At first I thought this was sarcasm...

Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.

>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB

The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files

They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.

SMB would not do any of this.

>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.

Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/910766/

Generally speaking unless you are prepared to (at a minimum)

1. Harden the operating system

2. Actively monitor logs, and apply updates upon release

3. Put a Firewall with IDS/IPS between the server and the internet (which most home "routers" do not provide)

you should not put anything on the wider internet, instead using something like tailscale (which you mention in another post) to create a secured private network across unsecured inet

I feel like the better approach to what you want is "let Jellyfin/etc access other people's media servers (syncthing, torrent, smb, somehow)".

And there are FUSE filesystems that do transcoding, but they have really weird limitations because of FUSE and wouldn't let you change bitrate during a watch based on network conditions (if you're the kind of person to watch shows on a phone on LTE on a subway for instance).

Even though I selfhost (some things) I am very biased towards more "centralized" stuff (aka serve off the NAS in my house and let most stuff be web clients/thin clients) because of the seamless experience... I very commonly go from using an app on my phone to the same app on my desktop to on my laptop when I travel and even on my tablet or my TV and if everything just works the same it's all so much better then having to deal with weird oddities because maybe read status doesn't work or some metadata doesn't show up properly or whatever.

(or in other words just cobble stuff together ~once and then let all the other devices use the result)

> At first I thought this was sarcasm... Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.

Fearmongering FUDdy advice thats a decade old now. There's nothing in this 10 year old post that seems relevant today, from what I can tell. People just cannot give up their fear! Get over it.

https://superuser.com/a/311664

Post a real reply if you have it but dont just shit up a topic with insubstantiated terrormongering.

> They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis. SMB would not do any of this.

Have you never used a media player on a phone? They all do this. I should be able to do this with files on my phone, or files shared with my phone. I dont see ehy custom software beyond a regular media playing app is warranted.

Except transcoding. That alone is a harder problem.

That sounds way overblown on multiple levels. "Harden the OS"... why... if you are port forwarding samba? Firewall with IDP? Please. This kind of advice seems designed to intimidate & scare, and it's absurd & cruel to convince people self hosting is so impossible and terrifying. Geeks oversell their conservative paranoia & gate-keeping like this all the te but this naysaying is just posionous!

I've gone through every CVE for Samba & there seemingly is 1 potential problem since 2007 that would possibly potentially be an issue for a basic non-domaim controller smbd fileshare that a random non-user could possibly exploit. If you dont trust your users, there's indeed some CVEs of real threat, but still, like... 4.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-102/...

Yes you probably should update fairly regularly, just in case. But more often than not, if you are a couple years behind, it's not a problem. Maybe someday that goes bad. But... so far... being super lax on updates generally hasnt had much impact. Maybe check logs every now and then, but honestly... once you have some confidence, it's fine. This stuff runs fine. It's easy.

One problem with (at least samba) is that the configuration is a PITA and it's easy to do a lot of unsafe things (which probably wouldn't get a CVE because "well you enabled anonymous users, which are often enabled by default by distributions...")

(at least compared to caddy or wireguard...)

Yes the entire cyber security industry is just one big con... One big FUD attemptinh to prevent you from playing your media on your phone. You got us... My 20+ years of professional networking and security is a just fear mongering scam....

In reality cve's only get you so far and chances are you have left something open for some one to exploit and are right now probably sending out Nigerian Prince emails from your network or part of a ddos swarm or something like that.

One day I will see a post from you about how to buy some Bitcoin to unencrypt your files

As to "media apps on my phone". Consume media on multiple devices the least used on is my phone. Even if the app on the phone did that it would not translate to my Roku's, FireTVs, and other media devices, and they would not sync

I am & I have seen a number of people run samba just fine & it took like 20 minutes to set up. Are there reports online of this going bad? Would I be the first ever to try this & to have it explode?

Clutching of pearls yo. It's so not a big deal. Dont be driven by fear, dont sell fear.

A quick search shows Windows has had SMB specific zero days in 2017 and 2011.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smb-zero-day-...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513099/new-windows-ze...