I am looking to basically just transition to a small time, forever on, server to support my growing Plex footprint. I don’t need anything top of the line, and I’ve already crimped my lines to the room.
What’s the most cost effective way to go about this? Figured i would come to the pros.
Thanks!
See, I hadn’t even heard that. Is JF on anything like Apple TV (like Plex) or would i have to figure out the streaming part?
It’s pretty much everywhere Plex is. The main issue is that it’s trickier to set up for sharing outside your LAN.
I would never be doing that, so I’m sold on it then. It’s basically just my backup movie/TV hub for my LAN.
I’ve ran Jellyfin as an app on a used Dell Optiplex 7060 micro running TrueNAS for a while with zero issues. You can get them for less than $200 on eBay.
Definitely suggested then, you’re also going to get drastically more features. If you remember a time when Plex plugins were available - its that. And more flexible.
Any intel-based chipset past 6th gen or so will be ok, 7+ recommended, 10th+ for AV1. If you aren’t doing any transcoding, just about anything will work include a pi.
Does TailScale make this easier or nah?
Very easy server-wise. But you may neeed to help your family member/friend with the initial set up on the client, if they are not so tech-savy.
From my limited testing of tailscale a while back, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work. Saw no reason to switch from my wireguard setup.
Can confirm it works. I have jf over tailscale.
I use my own domain but could be done using tailscale urls if you dont want to deal with certificates, split horizon dns, etc.
The Jellyfin clients for Apple TV are not very good in my opinion and use case. Thankfully there are a lot more than there used to be 6 months ago. But, at least for me, they are lacking in features. I keep trying to them every so often hoping they have improved so I can finally make thr switch.
On the Apple tv just use infuse. Sure it sucks paying for an app, but it works.
Glad it works for you, but it is missing live tv, which is the biggest thing all the Jellyfin apps either do poorly or don’t do at all. I went through all 19 ish apps I could find a few weeks ago and none of them checked off all my boxes. But I will keep looking and hoping.
It’s basically a web server to play media on the front end and a metadata manager and conversion engine on the back.
Pretty well the same as Plex but there’s less reliance on external services, more truly self contained and less subscription. There are client apps for most streaming boxes that I know of.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/