I don’t use jellyfin but my general approach is either:

1. Expose it over a VPN only. I usually use Tailscale for this so that I can expose individual machines but you do you
2. Cloudflare tunnel that exposes a single port on a single internal machine to a subdomain I own

There are obviously ways to do this all on your own but… if you are asking this question you probably want to use one of those to roll it. Because you can leave yourself ridiculously vulnerable if you do it yourself.

If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.

Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).

To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.

This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.

That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.

Storage is cheap until it isn’t.

On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.

If dependencies are articulated (and maintained…) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So appfoo depends in libbar@2:2.9 and so forth. Of course, the reality is that libbar is poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in libbar@2.1.3.4.5 anyway.

Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application’s dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds… at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.

And yeah… I run way too many appimages too.

Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.

And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to “weirdness” when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a…

That’s nice.

That doesn’t work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don’t want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don’t want to expose your internal home network at all.

Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.

Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.

Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just… what we can see in this thread.

Did they? Or is that still the old hack of “just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer”?

Because I didn’t see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren’t using jellyfin.

Which is “fine”. I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But… why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.

Yeah.

Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs…) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn’t a competitor.

Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn’t have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex’s works maybe 40% of the time but… 40% is still higher than 0%.

I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and… it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS “alternatives”. It isn’t an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.

To put it bluntly, Plex is an “offline netflix” as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.

If you find an author you like, check their website. There are decent odds they directly sell ebooks or link to their publisher’s website first. I’ve heard mixed reports on it, but some people claim buying direct from the publisher gives the writer a bigger cut (and, obviously, buying from them directly does).

Usually resutls in a DRM free ebook without any effort.

Yeah. Adobe is basically easy mode. It is why so many people, erroneously, claim that Kobo has no DRM (it also uses Adobe Digital Editions).

Guides for that are basically everywhere and versions don’t matter at all. Was going to set that up with just a bottle but it is harder to get ADE to run under wine than it is to use the drm removal plugin with it and I have this Windows VM just sitting in a folder…

Yup.

A Sanderson book will be on every tracker. But ML Wang? Maybe now that booktube love them but most smaller writers don’t get that

And, truth be told, I like reading and want authors I like to be able to justify the time spent writing.

Can’t hurt. But the batch file creates a dummy file that actively prevents k4pc from downloading any updates. Amazon could always change how it handles updates but… that would require an update to take effect.

The big issue is that Kindle is actually a spectacularly author friendly platform and stuff like Kindle unlimited locks them in it

So I buy most of my e-books via kobo or direct purchases from the authors. But some are still locked in Kindle

Can never tell who is going to wipe their posts on reddit or not so reproducing this here (and locally for my own use) since a lot of people have been trying to do this and this method still works as of March 12th 2025.