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I just finished setting up my own Jellyfin server. Lately I’ve been getting into using open source software and this weekend I thought it would be nice to self host on an old thinkpad I had from my college days. There were a few roadblocks I encountered, but ultimately I got it working. Now with the Finamp/Jellyfin app I can have a Spotify/Netflix-like experience completely free (well minus the domain name cost). I highly recommend it if you have been thinking about doing it for a while like I was. I’m so glad we have open source software like Lemmy and Jellyfin available to us.

I’ve been quite happy with Jellyfin on my NAS at home, but I haven’t set up remote access yet. I’m planning on a headscale/tailscale setup that, when I find my RaspPi.

How is Jellyfin for music? I’ve only used it for TV/Movies.

I’ve really enjoyed it for music. My favourite part has been throwing a decades old collection into it and shuffle playing the whole lot. So many forgotten tunes.

I use the Finamp app to access my Jellyfin music collection, which works well. It gives a dedicated music app rather than a generic Jellyfin everything app.

Nice work! Self-hosting is a lot of fun.

But also: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/using-cloudflare-for-remote-access-to-jellyfin/855051

Cloudflare is gonna smack you.

Haven’t personally verified it but I’ve heard some people say Jellyfin hosting (or the sorts) is against Cloudflares ToS. No idea if this is accurate but might be worth looking in to

Just keep in mind. It is against cloudflare’s TOS to use it for media streaming, plenty do and most don’t have an issue. But if you try to share access and there is excessive traffic, cloudflare may shut you down.

You can look into running pangolin on a small VPS or just opening the ports and using your home IP (of course behind a HTTPs proxy)

We have Jellyfin with remote streaming as well though we use Tailscale for that and works great

I don’t think it is, there are differences in their terms for these tunnels and other services. I don’t recall the specifics, but I did look it up before I set up the same thing.

I currently run mine through Tailscale, but plan on getting a domain this year and then handing out access to my family. I’ve got traefik mostly set up, but would also like to add in authelia as well. I’ve also got navidrome for music, audiobookshelf for audiobooks, mealie for recipes, calibre for books, bookstack for a wiki and immich for photos but I haven’t actually started imported anything yet on those 2, though both do work. I think I also would like to run vaultwarden

Before I get a domain I should maybe just try out headscale and see how that goes

The Jellyfin web app is ok for music playback, if you mostly listen to albums. It’s a video first platform.

There are third party music apps that can access your Jellyfin music library. I like both Finamp (iOS) and Feisin (Linux). Those being music centric, are a bit better than the web UI, but they are still hampered by Jellyfin’s album centric design.

There is no real easy way to build playlists , regardless of what front end you use. Importing playlists is borderline impossible due to the playlist being a table in Jellyfin’s database.

If you prefer to listen to music through playlists, I’d recommend Navidrome as a separate service for music. While building playlists can still be painful, it can import playlist files so your not just limited to whatever workflow your frontend pushes.

Ohh, Navidrome looks great. Thanks for the suggestion!

Give it time. I was very careful to setup my tunnel for media streaming like those guides, disabling any sort of caching, etc. and they killed it 2 months ago.

Ended up just getting a cheap simple VPS and running Pangolin myself instead.

psa: using something like wireguard is much more secure over exposing services directly.

Nice!

I’m using my own Wireguard tunnel to make it accessible: https://codeberg.org/skjalli/jellyfin-vps-setup

Damn. Thanks for this I’ll look into it.

Good to know. If I’m using it, it’s through a VPN to my local network, but I do have it set up at family members’ houses through the external link too.

Also worth looking into tailscale if it’s just for personal use but not ideal for sharing

I can vouch for a wireguard+jellyfin setup - I don’t have it on a VPS though. Instead, I have a little mini PC running opnsense (and wireguard) in the attic. I can open one port, connect from almost everywhere and have access to my whole internal network while I’m away.

And reverse proxies are overkill anyway unless OP’s planning to allow lots of tech-illiterate people access who will never know how to import a Wireguard config file or even what any of those words mean.

My problem is that I don’t have a fixed IPv4 address and jot even a ‘real’ one (don’t ask, Germany Cable internet…). So if I am somewhere where I don’t have an IPv6 I cannot connect to it. I also did this via VPS to share with family without having them to set up wireguard etc.

Pangolin on oracle always free also works quite good, if you can understand the ui that is I had some difficulties but it works now.

I have been using CloudFlare tunnel to stream Plex, Jellyfin, and now Emby (of the three, I prefer Emby for now) to a couple of family members, and I haven’t been pinged yet. I will look into Tailscale as an alternative or backup route though, just in case.

To be fair, the vast vast majority of families would throw a fit (or just go back to Netflix/Spotify) if they have to put on wireguard to access jellyfin or a navidrome server for streaming while they are out and about.

We on Lemmy tend to extensively overestimate tech literacy.

Yeah that’s why I ended up doing a reverse proxy for mine, and got a better router to handle security (unifi cloud gateway fiber). Family just clicks a bookmark or opens an app and it’s there. No fuss.

Just by chance I was in your exact situation. I have Vodafone Kabel with theoretically only ipv4 over ipv6. If you ring them up and say you’re looking to set up port forwarding and you have a specific legacy application that needs an ipv4 address, like an MS-DOS server without a TCP6 stack, they have the ability to assign you an ipv4 address. I had to get passed to second level support for them to do this though, but they ended up doing it for me for no additional cost! Try it out and viel Erfolg wünsche ich dir :-)

Thank you very much for that info :). I heard that some people had luck and others didn’t. Will try it out at some point. For Jellyfin I still prefer the VPS though so I don’t have to open a port.

Just wanted to say thanks for making me aware of pangolin. I got it up and running! This is so awesome, I can’t believe it exists.