Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

> The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV, and phone. I'd never used it before.

Combine with a $5 VPS and nginix reverse proxy to make this true for any device, even ones without tailscale!

Or Cloudflare Argo tunnels for $0/mo :)

That's against their ToS.

I’d not put Jellyfin on a public IP, even indirectly. I’d be surprised if it’s not full of exploits.

I whitelist my friends IP blocks, seems to work well enough.

No way in hell I'm convincing them to install tailscale or similar on their TV / router.

How's the bandwidth and transfer limits on that $5 VPS, would be my next concern? One approximately-perfect-Bluray-quality 4K movie can be north of 50GB, decent quality, still 20+GB. Very-high-quality 1080p is gonna be like 8-12GB for a movie, OK quality, 4.5-6GB.

There was just another one recently actually. It was the final straw that convinced me to stop making my Jellyfin server publicly accessible (for my family abroad) and move to a VPN based solution instead (WireGuard or Tailscale I haven’t set it up yet).