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 started out with Jellyfin. However, when it came to opening up the media server to friends and family, I had to roll up an instance of Plex (and eventually bought their pass).
Plex simply requires less fiddling to get things to acceptable state, especially for users outside your home network. Their guides are very straightforward.
Moreover, the apps are more polished and reliable, especially for TV platforms. Fortunately, some third party polished apps like Infuse and Plezy also support Jellyfin should you choose to switch servers later (I know that I do).
Though the reason Plex is convenient, is also its most ickiest part. I hate that Plex owns the middle layer which handles authentication and other orchestration. That same piece of infrastructure can also bring down your media server if it goes down (though it can be partially mitigated by disabling authentication for devices on LAN so that devices on your home network can still access your media).
I eventually plan to move everyone to Jellyfin, but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon as the apps are not there yet, and I will also have to redo parts of my infrastructure.
Infuse is paid but only requires a SMB share somewhere on your LAN, no special server to fiddle with. Easiest of the bunch, especially if you have an appleTV.