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
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
Run Opnsense or pfSense and do that from your firewall.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/CS72kN2c6hU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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?
That’s just on your router, no?
no idea, I dont know how to do any of that
This tutorial explains everything in detail.
Edit: I stupidly assumed you are using windows. But anywayys…if you are thats a good tut
I am on windows, your stupidity paid off. Hooray stupid but lucky people! (sadly Im only stupid, not lucky)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This tutorial explains everything in detail.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Followed that guide and only managed to make my duckdns domain lead to my router…
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
you’ll need to have your own hostname and make it point to your home IP address, just in case it wasn’t clear enough
It’s good you are trying to help but I’m not sure someone copying and pasting whatever they read should have a port exposed to the Internet.
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
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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?
JFL at using Plex with their shenanigans recently
VPN. Wireguard is pretty easy.
I wouldn’t bother with a paid dynamic DNS. Most domain registrars let you change your DNS record with an API call (I know GoDaddy does because I use them.)
Then you just set up a cron job to fetch your IP and then change your DNS record to match. I use a subdomain because my main domain hosts a blog and some other stuff on a VPS, while my jellyfin server is at home.
A good search would be “[registrar name] dynamic DNS script”
How frequently does your cronjob run?
I think every 12 hours? I’m not sure. But it doesn’t need to be super frequent, unless your IP changes often
Ddns is your answer, check your router and see what it can support or just go with whatever you feel good for you and install their updater on your server.
Doesnt matter if you have dynamic or static.
But it will matter once CG-NAT comes into play.Sincerely a dynamic IP jellyfin user with a reverse proxy.
Run a VPS as a VPN server with ports forwarded. Run a VPN client on your router to forward Internet facing traffic from Jellyfin to said VPN tunnel. Essentially, open ports on the VPS instead of your own router. This is conceptually similar to Cloudflare tunnels.
I’ve set up a cloudflare tunnel, all you need is a domain. It forwards my local Jellyfin instance to the public web, and is easy to get started with. I’m not sure how secure it is though, so I would appreciate any advice from more enlightened pirates.
Is there an easy, free method of doing this securely and privately (as in masked from the ISP) in a way that doesn’t involve me having to manage the network of the person I’m sharing with?
For example, I can use Tailscale for free, but then I have to make sure my friends know how to use that, and that’s a tall order. Not to mention the fact it won’t work on things like Roku.
VPN and have them punch in to a cheap or free cloud instance that acts as a hub router.
You give them a config file and they feed it to their device or router, use a private subnet in the 10.0.0.0/8 range because everyone is on 192.168.1.0/24 and then they just hit it at 10.0.0.1 or whatever.
I like Wireguard but you might have to use something with layer 2 support if you want service discovery to work for true zero config.
All good stuff, but I should clarify, the friends and family in question are not tech literate people. They call the internet “the wifi”, get the shitty gateway from Spectrum and plug it in.
Assuming I can apply any sort of configuration to that device in the first place, the second something breaks, either I’m getting a call, or they’ll call Spectrum and their rep will reset the gateway to defaults.
I’d also be hesitant to employ a VPN to cloud solution, because I have no idea what that’s going to do to the speed.
Basically I was just asking if there was a free method of doing this securely and discreetly where the only thing they ever have to do is put an IP address into Jellyfin. I’m perfectly aware there may not be, I was just curious if there was a method I hadn’t heard of.
Something I’ve kind of thought about is maybe, at least for my parents and closest friend, buying a cheap local machine (or repurposing an old OptiPlex or something) for them to keep in the house that I would mirror my library to, or least be able to manage remotely. “Sure, mom, you wanna see this? I’ll tell your box to fetch it.”
You have to expose it to the internet if you don’t want your users to have to configure a vpn. Ensure good passwords and consider running a rate limiter.
Too keep hidden from ISP, you can use tailscale funnel.
Ok cool, didn’t realize they’d added this.
If they can find a solution for Android not being able to run Tailscale and a different VPN at the same time, I’d finally be able to commit to it fully.
It isn’t free, but I use a seedbox for running my Plex server. That way none of the media downloading is done on our local internet, all the ISP should see is that we are streaming data from a Plex server. They’d have no knowledge on if we own that data or not. I’m sure Jellyfin can also easily be run from a seedbox
Having a seedbox is also helpful because our internet has a pretty low upload speed, which would make watching anything outside the house a massive pain.
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.
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.
It’s more the result of there not being much demand for the entire 20 year run of Pokemon, so they didn’t bother keeping them packaged together. Otherwise they’d have priced it accordingly, and the services may not have wanted it at that price.
It’s like how classic Doctor Who and current Doctor Who weren’t packaged together: the demand for one was diff than the other, so it made sense to let streaming services only pay for the one their customers wanted most.
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.
Crunchyroll’s UI on Roku and other TVs also sucks balls, and is prone to crashing on the slightest whim.
It’s a completely piece of shit. I’ve never seen so many bugs in a streaming app
It’s what happens when the devs have to spend more time making sure the DRM works than actually improving the UX of the platform. Pirates/Non-DRM users don’t have that problem hence small FOSS projects can outclass big Streaming Services in UX quality.
TIL there’s more than one season of FLCL - loved that show back in the day. Is the new stuff good?
I’ve only seen the first season lol. Planning on starting the second tonight. Apparently there’s a 4th and 5th season as well that I’m just learning about, so 2 and 3 must have gone well!
Not really
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
Keelhauling?
I can think of a fine word that also brings to mind flowing water - torrenting!
But ironically that isn’t the same as streaming
Popcorn Time streamed using bittorrent, so it’s not impossible :)
So does Stremio
Streaming would work
Piraming 💀
preaming
Planking.
Pirating
Sailing
Strailing could work well. A combination of streaming and sailing, as in sailing the high seas.
Oceaning or seaing. Because pirates don’t sail streams.
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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)
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/
Give it a try.
I was a Plex early adopter. Left Plex for Jellyfin when the Jellyfin project was barely a year old because it was clear where Plex was heading. (Emby was another option then, but they made some decisions I couldn’t abide so I skipped right over them)
0 regrets, and even my non-technical spouse and two children have no problem with it.
Everyone’s got their opinions, but the one guy slagging off Jellyfin below sounds like he’s never actually used it.
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.
if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (…) Plex is the place to go.
What does this even mean? My 6 year old niece uses jellyfin, it’s actually simpler than netflix. I may be biased because I’m not into frills but I think the UI looks great. I’ve admittedly had a few non-critical bugs with the UI (web, flatpak, android, roku) but most all of them have been worked out now. Plex is more polished and has a much larger ecosystem like you said, but the rest of this comment is not the most reasonable.
First and foremost, I don’t know or particularly care about fanclub opinions as a whole. Not trying to be rude or anything, but it’s weird to tell me that A is great despite what B fans tell me when I never even heard a word from B fans to begin with.
I’ve looked briefly into plex recently, which seems bloated with services and monetization that I don’t want or care about (even the help articles are written like ads), and I’ve looked at the 3 websites for Jellyfin that I linked, and Jellyfin seems like a more clear cut and feature rich version of what plex started out as, which was primarily a media server program.
I have a large amount of users on my Jellyfin instance including people who are more tech illiterate and nobody has had any issues. The setup of Jellyfin is probably more complicated than Plex (just guessing, I haven’t tried it) but besides that, the UI is very user friendly
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
When you say “hardware encoding”, are you talking about using your GPU for stuff like transcoding when streaming to devices?
I ask because I actively disable all transcoding because I run jellyfin off my laptop and don’t wanna overwork it so to speak. I just assumed it was using the GPU.
Yes, I use my server from outside my home quite often and don’t always have wifi fast enough for 4k movies, so I have plex break it down to my bandwidth. Works like a charm. Jellyfin just refuses to work.
Jellyfin just refuses to work.
…for you.
Ah, my use case right now is almost exclusively streaming stuff from my laptop to a phone with HEVC support over a local network so I can just turn transcoding off and be okay.
I did however have issues with my lack of transcoding (I turned it off myself, not Jellyfin’s fault. Pitchforks down, people) on a tablet without hardware HEVC support though so I may have to experiment with it soon.
FWIW I had to go in and turn the feature off but there’s also a good chance it was using CPU instead of GPU
No, thank you for making me get out of bed to set it up on my server.
The mobile app is so much better. Plex works better on LG WebOS, but I’d say it’s on equal footing on Google TV.
Tailscale also seemed to work perfectly fine for remote access.
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.
Yea, Plex requiring an internet connect just to stream locally tells me all I need to know about them.
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.
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.
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
Plex makes it a lot easier for things like hardware encoding and sharing outside of network, but jellyfin needs some work to get there
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?
Yeah no, i don’t have the time I’ve got my own shit to do. My Plex system is almost entirely automated. Ombi let’s me request a show with a single tap, sonarr finds it from my sources, sends that to transmission, then once it’s download imports it and puts symlinks with proper naming into the library folders. And then plex properly matches up the metadata.
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.
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.
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!!”
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.
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.
What was it missing?
Easy remote support was the main one. Phone app? Ability to easily add family members without too much config. Mainly was ease of remote access.
One other thing that sucks is lack of cast support on finamp and 90% of the time when I reopen the app it’s lost the progress of what I was listening to. Ui is worse than plexamp but a long shot imo.
Same
Next, add jellyseerr to the setup for a even more convenient setup 😉
Static IP that shit.
Yo ho ho
Me when I find that perfect rip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivzSZ9FzsFk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=ivzSZ9FzsFk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Hahaha not bad
Haha I was so confused until I realized they meant “legally streaming anime”. Ri-dicks
Oh Canada
You’re no fan of us? Cause our movie and TV shows are so amateur?
Edit: I guess they’re aren’t many Classified fans on Lemmy
Our home and native land
Movie singular?
I mean…tbh…half the shit I find on our local networks isn’t that interesting tbh…
Just wait until you find out about news groups 🤯
Spill the tea I want the open secrets
Spill the tea
I guess he’s talking about the Usenet, a way to get your warez via direct download from a Usenet provider. This makes it possible to pirate legally with blazing fast speed (like 5 to 10 min for 4k movies) and with the right Indexers, you can find any release existing in predb 😎
I feel like I’ve always missed something with Usenet. Like I don’t fully understand it. I understand what newsgroups were back in the day I think - basically forums hosted by your ISP and people broke files into segments to spread them across posts or whatever, then you’d combine them and have a file. These would be super fast because it’s over your link to your ISP, but I don’t get how it’s still alive and well and not taken down.
Attentions oversimplified:
The usenet is a network of servers in which each has file snippets that have a ID. All the servers sync their file snippet database so that all servers have all the snippets (some prune older snippets).
You then make a subscription at one of of those server provider and are then allowed to download those snippets.
Your downloader gets a map with the info which snippets to get and how to add them to get a file
Those maps (NZBfiles) you get from indexers (preferably private ones), similar as it is with torrents.
The usenet was created and used to fight censorship in 1980 only intended for text at first, but later it was discovered, that one can use this protocol for file sharing as well. It is hard to take down because of it’s decentralized design.
It is like the the prehistoric blockchain, lol
Because they’d have to take down every mirror, and that’s a daunting task, as I understand it.
Legally? 🤔
Or do you mean to say that a VPN isn’t strictly required?
Not legally, but I never use a VPN for newsgroup downloads.
Yes, downloading aka receiving copyright protected stuff is not illegal in my country, only the act of sharing aka uploading copyright protected stuff in order that it is available for other people, is illegal. You are even allowed to share copyright protected stuff with your “close circle of friends” And that is why we don’t need a vpn to download from the usenet
Newsgroups go over an encrypted connection so no need to mess with VPNs and torrent boxes etc. subscribe to one or two nzb sites, a news group host and wire it up with somarr locally.
I still have disney and amazon prime from somewhere, I sure as fuck didn’t pay for Disney. But i still just rather sonarr that shit.
I currently have a prime sub, but anything I watch on prime I just pirate instead. I’m on linux so torrenting gets me better video quality.
Ok but what about streaming them in the seas media group?
How do I grant Jellyfin access to an external drive on Ubuntu?
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’s like Plex but free and open source
