If you host a server and have a lifetime pass, you’ll be able to share your collection with anyone. It will allow hardware encoding so less lag on your users end. You can also locally download content on your devices to watch offline.
I don’t want to share my media with anyone and see no reason to stream from outside my house, it’s not like I can take my home cinema with me. Also, why would you want to re-encode and lower the quality?
Just because the use case isn’t useful for you doesn’t mean it’s useless for everyone. I have a family who enjoys media and I like sharing with those that I like. Encoding is necessary for people who are not physically in my house and who may be viewing on a mobile device.
You asked why anyone would want these features, I explained why I use them, and you’ve taken it as me trying to convince you that you needed it. Wild.
Well in your case you don’t need the subscription at all, apart from some minor things the subscription won’t do anything for you.
But I do all the things you’re not doing. I share my server with dozens of friends/family so I need remote streaming. I can watch shows on my own server no matter where I am (at work or when visiting relatives, or even on the phone on the train). And if you streaming on the phone or with bad internet in general it might sometimes be a good idea to reduce quality to save bandwidth.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don’t need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They’re an Apple user and I’m aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it’s the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
Yeah, that’s a potential solution, but then my sister’s starting college soon so she’d need to VPN into one of the networks when she’s not at home; which brings us back to square one.
Then there’s whenever they’re not home and want to watch something on their phone or laptop.
Jellyfin is quite easy to use remotely (prerequisite: purchased domain (easy), tunnel VPN (complex) or public static IP (not always an option)). I confess I use Emby as I bought premium for it once I learned how much it suits me, and the UI is much nicer and rounded – although I didn’t need to pay in order to do most of what I wanted. I can say that my friends access the library with a one time login and minimal friction, but I’m also not going to preach further - sometimes it’s better not to fuck with a working system, and I respect your choice
I think my biggest hurdle for Jellyfin is setting up a VPS for all my self hosted services. Currently I use Cloudflare Tunnels, which is easy but I’d like to get away from it because Cloudflare and it doesn’t allow for streaming services to run on it.
I’ll spin up Jellyfin and see how Swiftfin is on the Apple TV. If I feel it has minimal friction I’ll try and make the jump.
With regards to spreading the good word of self hosting, I’ve had the best luck just offering good services to those around me. Spliit, HomeAssistant, and Immich have been easy to get my partner to use. Then I just happen to say “oh yeah, this is running on my server btw”. The holy grail would be to convince my friends to use Fluxer or something instead of Discord.
I have a Fluxer login but I keep forgetting to log into it. I’ve been on Matrix lately, and Osmium for another Discord server that was nuked for basically no reason.
If you host a server and have a lifetime pass, you’ll be able to share your collection with anyone. It will allow hardware encoding so less lag on your users end. You can also locally download content on your devices to watch offline.
So no useful features for me.
I don’t want to share my media with anyone and see no reason to stream from outside my house, it’s not like I can take my home cinema with me. Also, why would you want to re-encode and lower the quality?
Just because the use case isn’t useful for you doesn’t mean it’s useless for everyone. I have a family who enjoys media and I like sharing with those that I like. Encoding is necessary for people who are not physically in my house and who may be viewing on a mobile device.
You asked why anyone would want these features, I explained why I use them, and you’ve taken it as me trying to convince you that you needed it. Wild.
Well in your case you don’t need the subscription at all, apart from some minor things the subscription won’t do anything for you.
But I do all the things you’re not doing. I share my server with dozens of friends/family so I need remote streaming. I can watch shows on my own server no matter where I am (at work or when visiting relatives, or even on the phone on the train). And if you streaming on the phone or with bad internet in general it might sometimes be a good idea to reduce quality to save bandwidth.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don’t need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They’re an Apple user and I’m aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it’s the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
Just set up VPN between your router and their router, no need to explain anything.
Yeah, that’s a potential solution, but then my sister’s starting college soon so she’d need to VPN into one of the networks when she’s not at home; which brings us back to square one.
Then there’s whenever they’re not home and want to watch something on their phone or laptop.
Jellyfin is quite easy to use remotely (prerequisite: purchased domain (easy), tunnel VPN (complex) or public static IP (not always an option)). I confess I use Emby as I bought premium for it once I learned how much it suits me, and the UI is much nicer and rounded – although I didn’t need to pay in order to do most of what I wanted. I can say that my friends access the library with a one time login and minimal friction, but I’m also not going to preach further - sometimes it’s better not to fuck with a working system, and I respect your choice
Similarly, I have a Plex lifetime license.
I think my biggest hurdle for Jellyfin is setting up a VPS for all my self hosted services. Currently I use Cloudflare Tunnels, which is easy but I’d like to get away from it because Cloudflare and it doesn’t allow for streaming services to run on it.
I’ll spin up Jellyfin and see how Swiftfin is on the Apple TV. If I feel it has minimal friction I’ll try and make the jump.
With regards to spreading the good word of self hosting, I’ve had the best luck just offering good services to those around me. Spliit, HomeAssistant, and Immich have been easy to get my partner to use. Then I just happen to say “oh yeah, this is running on my server btw”. The holy grail would be to convince my friends to use Fluxer or something instead of Discord.
I have a Fluxer login but I keep forgetting to log into it. I’ve been on Matrix lately, and Osmium for another Discord server that was nuked for basically no reason.