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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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333 points indigodaddy | 3 comments | 13 Nov 22 02:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.777s | source
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rektide ◴[13 Nov 22 02:50 UTC] No.33579466[source]▶
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.

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1. dinosaurdynasty ◴[13 Nov 22 03:14 UTC] No.33579607[source]▶
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)

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2. rektide ◴[13 Nov 22 03:32 UTC] No.33579731[source]▶
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.

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3. dinosaurdynasty ◴[13 Nov 22 03:56 UTC] No.33579873[source]▶
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)