As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing, I’m jumping ship.

https://i.xno.dev/02fl4.png

Not that I’m some kind of UPS expert, but I’ve never found a UPS that NUT wasn’t compatible with.

Love Lowend. Just grabbed this deal from massiveGRID. Never heard of them, but I took a chance;

4 Shared Intel Xeon CPU vCores
8 RAM DDR4 ECC Registered (GB)
256 Primary High Availability SSD Storage (GB)
20 TB Guaranteed Internet Traffic
1 IP Addresses

I paid $141.28 for 3 years, and replied on their forum post for Lowend and they added 1 extra year of service for free, and activated lifetime pricing. So it works out to be about $2.95/mo which is a damn great price. The only real drawbacks are the network is 1 Gbps shared** and no IPv6 (they’re adding it over the next several weeks looks like).

**speedtest;

[root@dev ~]$ speedtest --secure
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Massivegrid (xx.xx.xx.xx)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Wnet (New York, NY) [0.09 km]: 2.429 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 1028.91 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 997.58 Mbit/s

So not absolutely mindblowing, but you seem to get the full 1 Gbps, which is great. I contacted support and they’ll be offering VDS plans soon with access to higher than 1 Gbps speeds. Super happy so far.

Oh, damn. Not much you can do then. You may be eventually be able to get something outrageously complicated to work, but honestly it’s just plain not worth it. Just get a cheap VPS.

Best you could do is a forward server with tailscale and a reverse_proxy, but I’ve never had any real luck getting that type of setup to work reliably.

I don’t see how it’s particularly hard? Could set it up in an afternoon and have a forward thinking infrastructure from then onward that can vertically scale.

my current ISP refuses to provide me a static IP

So then use dynamic dns? HurricaneElectric offers DynDNS now and it’s great. You can update it right over curl if you want. I have it mapped to a cli function;

~\downloads
❯ ddns
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Content-Length: 18
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:24:18 GMT
Email: DNS Administrator <dnsadmin@he.net>
Expires: Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:24:18 GMT
Server: dns.he.net v0.0.1

nochg {ip}

However, I also read about unbound in the Pi-Hole guides. I was curious if this was to prefer over cloudflared?

Many people advocate for Cloudflared as a tunneling solution, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all tool. Personally, I avoid it. Your VPS already functions as a firewall for your connection. Using Tailscale is also self-host and avoids reliance on third-party services like Cloudflare while maintaining security and the same functionality.

For DNS privacy, I prefer odoh-proxy, which enables your VPS to act as an oDoH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) proxy for the cloudflare network. While oDoH introduces a slight latency increase, it significantly enhances privacy by decoupling query origins from content, making it a more secure option for DNS resolution. So you would be able to set your DoH resolver to your domain (https://dns.whatever.com/dns-query) and it would forward the request to cloudflare for resolution, and then back again.

As for Pi-Hole, its utility has diminished with the modern alternatives like serverless-dns. It allows you to deploy RethinkDNS resolver servers on free platforms, handling 99% of security concerns out-of-the-box. The trade-off is a loss of full custody over your DNS infrastructure, which may matter to some users but is less critical for general use cases.

Lastly, using consumer VPNs like Mullvad to proxy connections often introduces unnecessary complexity without meaningful security gains. While VPNs have their place they can really overcomplicate setups like this and rarely provide substantial privacy benefits for services like DNS.

So that would be a limitation of whichever filesystem you use. I’ve not personally done it, but this reddit user uses a CEPH cluster to be able to hotplug storage into a volume. But doing just that gives you no redundancy, so you would have to do a little research into how to set it up in whichever way would be best for you, but it looks like using the CEPH cluster is what you’re looking for.

There are a lot of crypto which increase workfactor PoW to combat spam. Nano is one of them, so it’s a pretty proven technology, too.

The easiest solution would be to wipe Windows and replace it with Proxmox–which is an actual server solution. Then using Proxmox you can setup your other services from within Proxmox using docker or LXC containers.

There’s no real need to get crazy with it. From there everything is controlled by Proxmox via containers. You can easily setup Jellyfin/Plex, *arr stack, HomeAssistant, Frigate, and even your NAS. You can then import your configurations and for your NAS (using TrueNAS or whichever you’d like–Proxmox comes with its own NAS solutions) you’d be able to expose it to your existing shares. It comes with the advantage of a forward moving server setup that’s not “future proof” but future resistant. Proxmox is an actively developed and excellent server architecture. Although not officially, it can even expose your GPU to your containers so transcoding with Jellyfin/Plex should work just fine.

This is the most realistic solution. Adding a 0.5/1s PoW to hosted services isn’t gonna be a big deal for the end user, but offers a tiny bit of protection against bots, especially if the work factor is variable and escalates.

I guess it depends on when you last used it. I opt for the CLI approach, but Jellyfin can install a plugin which allows (on library scan) to extract internal subtitles, which fixes 90% of issues with subtitle display for devices like Chromecasts.

Jellyfin also integrates with OpenSubstiles: https://i.xno.dev/gVee6.png

Crazy how that doesn’t at all even address the problem of subtitle sync!

As I said, this isn’t even an issue with Jellyfin. It’s an issue with the device that’s playing the media–your television (or chromecast). This workaround makes an exact copy of the internal subs, and dumps them to an SRT which allows your television (or chromecast) to play the internal subtitles as external subtitles…

It has nothing to do with subsync, it’s not syncing subs. There are no “mistakes” because you’re pulling the internal subs exactly as they are internally, externally…

I don’t think you’re being objective here

I don’t feel that’s the case. I feel that you’re the one not being objective here. You’re holding things against Jellyfin which have nothing to do with it as a platform, but instead are either misconfigurations on your part, or involve your local setup…

I also run both. I don’t see what this has to do with anything. I’m not lambasting you for “choosing” Plex over Jellyfin. I’m saying you’re not being objective while pretending that you are, which is simply objectively untrue.

I use Jellyfin on my devices, except on Android TV because the app is painful to navigate.

Again, this is you not being objective. You personally don’t like the way the Android TV application is laid out (which is totally fine) and count that as a negative against Jellyfin–which is my issue. Objectively the Android TV design follows the current design schema for TV applications and is the same layout as most media platform applications for Android TV…

Plex is way better for sharing

Which is not what these applications are designed to do…so it’s not at all weird that this is the case. You’re inventing shit up as metrics to compare Jellyfin and Plex and it’s just so incredibly weird to do.

These are both media streaming platforms, which they both do relatively well. The main issue between the two is Jellyfin is FOSS and Plex is not. Plex incorporates a ton of proprietary bullshit that you have to wade through or disable to get a similar experience to Jellyfin. Like “shareability.” That’s not what these platforms are designed for. That’s what Plex was changed to provide. Comparing Jellyfin and Plex on the basis of “shareability” is like comparing a Ford Pinto to a Ford F-150 and comparing their towing capacity. It makes no goddamn sense because the Pinto was never designed to tow anything…

Depends on any number of factors. A lot of datacenters will wait for 30-40k hours and drive swap because this is the nexus point at which they will begin to fail.

If you need hard drives for critical data applications, buy new. If you’re just looking for storage, and don’t care if they die within 10k hours because you have appropriate redundancy, then buy refurbished–but to make it worth it you still need to get a pretty great deal. Saving $70 on a refurbished drive simply isn’t worth it.

I have a huge issue with this post.

You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.

You install the plugin and run the routine. There’s literally nothing to setup…

Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks.

What are you even talking about? Hardware acceleration has worked absolutely flawlessly in Jellyfin since I’ve set it up. HEVC encoding is particularly great, and required nothing but a single click to enable it. Jellyfin re-encodes my videos using my GPU into HEVC without issues.

The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.

This is the only real valid criticism, but it’s not even an issue. It’s by design. Plex designs a single app and stretches it so it’s the same on every platform which may sound great, but it’s not… It’s only to save them development time. Jellyfin has an android app for phones, and android app for tablets, and an android app for televisions each of which play to the strengths of the different platforms… That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing.

Android TV app support sucks.

This is the fault of the television manufacturers, not the android app. This isn’t even valid criticism against Jellyfin.

The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working.

1. You can change the theme in any way you want. You can even download CSS directly from the web and change the TV app presentation in just about any way you want…
2. The subtitle feature, again, is a limitation of the devices that display jellyfin, not a limitation of jellyfin. It’s also easy to get around by extracting the subtitles.

Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not.

Yet another example of you blaming network devices on Jellyfin… My Synology NAS sleeps if it’s not used for 5 minutes–so if your buffer to jellyfin caches more than 5 minutes of media, then yeah, you’re going to have issues with buffering because you’ll run through your 5 minutes of media, and have to wake up the NAS to get more cache. This is again, not a jellyfin issue, it’s a configuration issue.

Yup.

Depends on how old. I don’t recommend using vastly underpowered hardware to stream media content.

Subtitles are the biggest non-issue it’s crazy… Some devices don’t support internal subs, so you just extract them for your entire library using ffmpeg;

pushd "\\nas\Media\Movies\"
fd -e mkv | each {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }

Once it’s done, it’s done forever for the files you have. As you add them, just run it again.

This thread is fucking blowing me away. It’s half people who realize that Plex is hot goddamn garbage, and the other half that are sucking its pp so hard it’s about to fall off.

Absolutely mindblowing to me that anyone would defend Plex and their proprietary garbage as “good.”