In their comments to a recent post that I made, asking people to share their torrenting ratios, some folks were talking about how they have setup media servers for their parents. This sounded really cool and I would like to do the same thing for my family.
I simply mount my torrenting drives with sshfs and consume media with mpv, because I don’t need anything else. But for my technologically less inclined family members, I guess setting up something with a GUI would be kind and nice.
I am torrenting on a VPN router, behind which there is a switch that only switches a specific port - which I rotate regularly for safety - to a public facing router, so that I can ssh into my home network.
Questions:
- I have no experience with or knowledge of these to me fancy sounding GUI projects. For instance, do my family members create accounts that I then approve? Do I need to install and setup something on their endpoints (for instance, to configure which port to use, etc.) or is it simple enough for the layperson to do this themselves?
- Will the fancy stuff accept and be accessible with port forwarding from my public facing router to my VPN router and then into my torrenting rig just like my ssh server does or am I going to have to set this up directly connected to the public facing router?
Please give me your most straightforward recommendations! 🥰
I currently am set up with Jellyfin as the GUI which gives your media library a Netflix-like front end. And I use Tailscale as a VPN to access media off my home network. You can send an invite link to your family to join your Tailscale network, and they create an account there. With Jellyfin, I just have everyone use one main account, but maybe there’s some other benefits to using separate Jellyfin accounts that I’m not aware of. Overall it’s pretty straightforward to setup in my opinion. Both those apps have Apple TV apps, which is important because that’s what my family uses to watch their tv already.
I use jellyseer with jellyfin so that my family can make requests for movies/shows thru another netflix-style GUI rather than messaging me constantly about whatever they wanna watch lol. You can set it up with auto approval if you trust them to manage shit, and they can just download stuff on demand without you having to be involved at all. Really great stack if you wanna be less involved in the whole process
Watch history, parental controls, library access controls, etc.
Parental controls are the biggest reason for me and my use.