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.

>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/

> 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.

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