Hi, all. So I want to set up a media server using my Raspberry Pi. It will be used by me and my partner, who is very much tech illiterate. She knows how to use Plex, but I’m tempted by the open nature of Jellyfin. How steep is the learning curve there? Should I just go with Plex and keep it simple? Or is Jellyfin manageable if I set it up for her?
Jellyfin all day every day
It still has issues to fix but it’s open source and actually yours
Plex is an enterprise solution, if you need your tech illiterate grandma to access the media it’s easier to pay them. If it’s just a local network or you’re okay with going down a rabbit hole of setup, then Jellyfin does everything and does it better IMO (Plex requires you to be online to login before it shows you your local data, plus you’re sharing information on what media files you have to Plex).
I personally have been using Jellyfin for years, and my only complain is that the LG app is slow and I get some videos that stuck for a few seconds in it (probably some codec thing, that I could fix by transcoding the media but I haven’t been bothered enough to figure it out)
For a perfect FOSS route? Jellyfin. It isn’t difficult to use at all for a normie — just select and play. Even my mom uses it.
But I wouldn’t put either on a raspberry Pi if you have media in formats like AV1 and/or in 4k and gonna play it on screens older than 5 years old. Transcoding will be extremely sluggish even on the newer Pis. Instead get a 11th gen (intel), ryzen 6000 (amd) cpus or newer OR rtx 40 series or newer GPU (dedicated gpu is faster with 4k). You can get powerful hardware if you plan to expand your self hosted stack.
I got a N100 mini PC with 16 GB RAM 6 months back thinking I will be running only Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Nginx Proxy Manager, Pihole, arr stack and Firefly iii. Now I have Immich, Paperless-ngx, Yamtrack, Baikal, Authentik, Calibre Web — around 40 containers. So my RAM is at 70% usage at this point. I learnt my lesson that self-hosting is a rabbit hole and I should have gotten beefier hardware.
neither, the raspberry pi doesn’t have a gpu to deal with transcoding so it’s gonna be frustrating when ur trynna watch or listen to anything (its gonna keep buffering). i highly recommend checking out your local auctions from big business or government that are giving away old mini computers and use that as a self-hosting measure instead (no more than 100$). raspberry pi is kind of a scam ngl since you can get much better hardware for cheaper, ur paying for a brand image
What are you on about? I’ve been hosting Plex on my raspberry pi without issue for literal years lol
what sort of stuff do you play on plex? and do you use the pi for other hosted services?
I play 4k and 1080p HD stuff all the time with 5.1 surround at home and when I travel. It also runs my pihole and I have a rudimentary raid 1 (def not real raid 1) running with the rsync command to mirror my media drive that backs my data up every day at midnight. It’s a punchy little fucker.
I don’t disagree that you’re generally paying for the name but it my 4b w/ 8GB ram I got as a gift kicks ass. There are definitely better machines out there but the pi can handle lots of what I ask of it.
I have an old 2 something I’m thinking of using to host my cloud storage on, too. I don’t mind if it’s slower uploading.
incheresting im not really sure what was wrong with my pi4 w/ 8gb ram then since it kept buffering every 3 seconds for 1080p stuff on jellyfin and it was frustrating af! i saw many others dealing with the same thing online and after seeing https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/hardware-acceleration/#raspberry-pi-hardware-acceleration-support-deprecation I thought it was a hardware problem but it could be something else or plex does things different im not sure. nevertheless im glad that happened to me since ive moved on to superior cheaper hardware and it made me careful of branded products when it comes to hardware in general. im glad that set up u have is working for you :3
friends don’t let friends use plex.
its paywalling yourself
Conversely, letting friends use your Jellyfin is complicated.
Tailscale and share the jellyfin node with friends. No need to have ports open or any DNS stuff. Clients are available for all systems.
Can you explain to my mom how to install tailscale on her Roku and that she has to turn it on each time she wants to use Jellyfin but then back off again when she wants to watch something on a different app?
Why exactly would they ever need to turn VPN off again? It’s not like all their traffic will go through it if it’s on, unless you specifically configure stuff that way (exit node, routes).
And one option to do the VPN stuff is on their router too, so it’s totally transparent to them. More stuff to configure though, unless running owrt or some other router software compatible with Tailscale.
As far as I understand, Tailscale (being a Wireguard network) doesn’t need you to flip it off and on - if you’re connecting to the relevant endpoint it gets routed through that, otherwise it just goes the normal way.
Not gonna pretend that means the setup is trivial to nomies, but you could probably set it up for them and not have to worry about it.
Yeah but it doesn’t auto connect on a lot of devices. So if you restart the device you have to reconnect. Tech illiterate people struggle with this concept.
Have zero knowledge of Roku but for example with AppleTV boxes it is totally fire and forget, Tailscale is always on in the background and apps will find my media servers through it.
And I’ve noticed even tech illiterate people will learn to become literate when there is some motivation, like a huge movie archive :) Flipping a preference like VPN on if they want to use certain app is certainly within realm of possibility.
reverse proxy that shit
eh, maybe. for me it was opening a port and adding a dns record. took me all of 4 minutes
im kinda lucky in that my isp uses ‘sticky’ ips so while its not static, ive had the same ip for 5 years
But now you’ve exposed your network to the open internet without any sort of security.
No you haven’t. The security is the Jellyfin login prompt, then Jellyfin itself, then the Jellyfin container, and if you’re really paranoid, that container won’t be in your LAN.
If you don’t trust nginx or caddy or etc security, just install Tailscale to the jellyfin node and share the node with friends. All they need is Tailscale client then, and you dont have to open any ports.
oh noes! im so ddead!
Peak “bad things only happen to other people” energy here. Ignorance and flippancy will surely protect you!
yes my world will burn when they crack into my jellyfin instance and magically break out of its docker container and then what? goo nowhere on its vlan?
literally thousands of self-hosted jellyfin/emby instances and the support forums are just chocked full of people getting hacked via it! so many!
oh wait, no there arent
Sadly, my ISP charges an arm and a leg for anything other than dhcp
Dynamic DNS has been around forever. A program monitors your public IP address and updates the DNS record when it changes. You can even use a service like FreeDNS if you don’t want to pay for a domain.
This was news to me, I will now be spending an afternoon trying to fix my self hosting setup in the near future
Jellyfin all the way. But I wouldn’t run it on a pi, I would look for something beefier.
I never needed transcoding. So jellyfin ran on my Raspi4 for a couple of years. Never faced any issues to be honest. Major issue was hard disk getting disconnected, but then again I had faulty SATA to USB connectors.
Yeah, unless one happens to have one of the beefier Raspi 4 or Raspi 5 variants (which, of course, would be an overpriced choice if their sole purpose is to be a home server). To give specific recommendation for cost-effective beefier home server hardware: Used Thin Clients. For example, Dell T530 Wyse (or T520, or T540, or the 6x0 series).
Only issue I had with my thin client node is the ethernet port sucked, dropped packets semi-consistently got a 2.5gb ethernet usb adapter to replace it and things have been noticeably better
I ran it on a RPi4 years ago, but it didn’t perform well enough. It performs fine on an old laptop, but not so much in a Pi from my experience. Can’t speak to the RPi5, though.
Yeah mine is an rpi3 and I wouldn’t even consider running jellyfin on it
Plex vs Jellyfin is a lot like Windows vs Linux in my view.
There are things in Plex you can point to that you think keep you from moving. I point to things in Plex I am glad I left behind.
I haven’t heard of any learning curve with Jellyfin. It seems easy to set up, and the apps are about as user friendly as you can get (especially the third party ones)
Only learning curve is naming. Jellyfin seems less forgiving about filenames and folder structure than Plex was.
On the other hand, jellyfin’s identify feature works better than plex’s did for me, and it lets you rename stuff very easily whereas Plex needed you to find the exact piece of media in a database.
My mom asked me to rip a set of weirdo bootleg tai chi DVDs years ago, back when I used Plex, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them to show up in the library because, again, weirdo bootleg media and I have no idea where she got them. But I switched to jellyfin last year and on a whim decided to mess with them, and getting them to show up in my jellyfin library was basically automatic
Edit, another fun example of fucking with Plex’s identify feature just came to mind. For some reason it kept deciding that random movies were actually some movie named “A Fish Called Wanda.” I’d never heard of it before, the movies it would misidentify were entirely random as far as I could tell, and no amount of fuckery would get it to identify the movie correctly. It would decide that, say, The Matrix was actually AFCW, I’d remove the files for The Matrix, and it would decide something else was AFCW. Eventually I got fed up and downloaded an actual copy of AFCW, but it still refused to play the correct files if I navigated to AFCW in my library. Never did figure that one out.
You should definitely watch “A Fish Called Wanda” though. It’s a classic.
Speaking of third party apps, here’s some recommendations:
Android: Findroid
Works absolutely great, it’s very rare that I even find a bug.iOS: Swiftfin
I don’t use iOS but this is the one I installed on my friend’s phones.Linux (and maybe Windows): Delfin
This is a GTK 4 app for Linux and maybe it has a Windows build too but I didn’t check. It’s not perfect, there’s bugs here and there but it mostly works fine. The developer isn’t very active (which is understandable), so it would be nice if someone, who has the time for it, would help out.Here’s also the official page with Jellyfin clients: https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/all
It doesn’t seem to include Delfin though.Why should I download an app instead of using the web interface?
Finamp was pretty good, but offline mode and playback had some quirks/struggles for me. Maybe its cuz im on graphineOS. The true winner for me on my pixel8 is symphonium. Its a one time purchase, with a free mode… absolute knockout. Zero bugs, great, easy UI, smart playlists, scrobble integration for discovery, etc etc etcccc
How steep is the learning curve there? Should I just go with Plex and keep it simple?
You’ve got it the wrong way round. Jellyfin is simple. I’ve never understood Plex.
Honestly I found plex a lot simpler to set up when I started out.
In Jellyfin I had to wrangle the settings a lot when trying to set up hardware encoding since my streams kept crashing due to some codecs not being dupported by my CPU.
The main difference between Plex and Jellyfin is the network setup. Plex takes care of that for you, while you have to set it up your self with Jellyfin. Another difference is that Plex can combine content from multiple servers ( I think. I’m not a plex user, so I don’t know for sure), while it will always be seperate servers in jellyfin.
Jellyfin will always have my heart though, because it’s open source and not here to make money. Plex also have a reputation to show ads and other stuff from streaming services.
The networking aspect is basically the only thing stopping me from switching from Plex to Jellyfin. I got Jellyfin running and accessing my server myself, while on my home network is easy. However, when it comes to accessing outside of my network, it gets complicated, and when it comes to other people accessing my server it gets more complicated, and then accessing my own server and friends’ servers it gets even more complicated.
With Plex, all of that is super easy. I can watch stuff from my own server and my friends’ servers on any device, including a web browser, and I can tell my mom, for example, “install Plex on your Roku and tell me what email address you use to log in” and boom, she has access to my library.
Jellyfin is A-ok for the tech illiterate. I actually think it might be easier to navigate and use because it’s a bit more simple than Plex.
I’d recommend Jellyfin. Dead easy to use.
I haven’t really used Plex a whole lot but I have found Jellyfin from a user perspective to be extremely easy to use. The quick connect codes are one of my favorite features.
Kodi is my preferred choice
No
Yes
I have only recently started with self hosting and after some minor frustration, i am in love!!! Plex isnt just worse cuz its paywalling your own files, its install, support and ui are pretty trash, imo. The one advantage i saw was that it was easy to share w folks. If your jellyfin is going to be secure AND accessible, thats more work to do.
Keep in mind jellyfin does NOT recommend using a pi, bc it struggles w transcoding etc. That said, my first go was an rpi5. I used this guide and it was pretty brainless… ezpz: Indian tech guru to the rescue!
Beware, uptime w the pi is pretty bad… had to restart server all the time, and some devices would not stream properly. It did work, mostly though, and it was a great intro for me since i just had it lying around.
Have fun!
