after almost 15yrs my plex server is no more. jellyfin behind nginx with authentik is running very nicely.
Did plex do something again
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Anyone have experience hosting a server for non-technical parents? Plex is just so plug and play and they have clients for even the shittiest old smart TVs.
Anything that has a remote interface is garbage. It's all cursor mouse based except on a few devices.
It's not as good as Plex by a long shot. If you have Plex pass no brainer. If not, I'd personally just buy the pass. On Xbox it was just unusable.
Honestly, the easiest thing to do is put it on a mesh VPN like Tailscale and connect their streaming device to your tailnet. If they’re non technical parents then if their TV OS doesn’t support Tailscale, you can pick up a Walmart brand ONN streaming box for <$50 which supports for Tailscale and Jellyfin.
I have been running in parallel both jelly and plex and jelly is good.
Foss superiority gang
There are a few things about jellyfin that I don't like compared to Plex. First I can't skip the intro of a show drives me nuts. The second one is it has newly added but not newly released. Other then that it has been really good.
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What is authentik and could I use it on podman with compose?
authentik is an identity server. theres a couple free ones available, this one just worked for me. it provides oauth and ldap fallback for the jellyfin server. along with login for most of the other servers i host like nextcloud/calibre-web/lychee etc. it has a nice easy log in process along with a 'homepage' kinda thing for everything my users can access with their account. makes it easier to support the non technical friends and family.
Its a pre-authentication gateway and SSO provider for OAuth/SAML. So if you dont trust a random docker container to be secure it requires you to authenticate and then it automatically passes a token to the app for SSO if it supports OAuth/SAML.
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How is the Jellyfin software situation looking? Last time I checked it was pretty meh compared to plex. if I recall correctly the best app was Infuse and it was a monthly sub. Are there better options these days? I mostly watch plex on my TV through Android or Apple TV.
I’m pretty sure you can pay for a lifetime access to infuse, cause I don’t think I pay monthly.
Its monthly or lifetime and the lifetime is like 6-8 years of paying monthly.
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I haven't done a bunch with it. I set it up locally on an old laptop, installed the app on my TV and on the other machines throughout the house. It works great when I use it. I stream a lot of content outside of it so I don't use it all the time but the interface I really liked. It's fluid even running the server on a laptop that would struggle to run a zoom call.
Believe I set it up with pop-os, but it could be mint. I haven't had to touch it in months so I honestly wouldn't know without going to it. I leave a RustDesk connection on it from my phone if I ever need to get to it.
swiftfin has reach what i'd call stable on apple tv. its a little janky still with homepods used as speakers. i had to switch the nativeplayer to avoid an audio delay bug. the native player doesn't support auto play next episode. so far thats the only issue ive had. infuse doesnt have that bug but the issue hasnt annoyed me enough to need infuse. all my other uses are on android tv or webos and have had no complaints. for music, manet has good carplay functionality so its made a nice replacement for plexamp.
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How do you keep all your virtual machines up-to-date? Or are those containers?
Unattended-upgrades or dnf-automatic
it's mostly debian 12 or ubuntu 22 lts vms, i'm slow dumping ubuntu. so it's all cron jobs running apt update and bash scripts for specific services like the minecraft server. i'm just old and have spent so much time modifying xml in nano that sticking with virsh has worked for me. i've only got two containers running in docker, frigate and authentik.
Why all those VMs instead of containers?
I saw this and was pleased, actually. The relative opacity of containers makes them a validation challenge and hides versioning from standard tooling used for large host populations and/or enterprise.
Even if they sparkle.
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