This article doesn’t mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
You’re right, I missed that.
I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
What in the goddamn fuck, sir
Step 1) Install tailscale (headscale also exists if you wanna fully self-host it)
Step 2) Done, solved
That doesn’t slove the problem if your Smart TV doesn’t support tailscale or something like Wireguard. Using another machine connected to a VPN like for example Tailscale/Headscale and then using ssh portforwarding allows you to access the service(jellyfin) on the device without support.
It would be like this:
Jellyfin <-- Tailscale/Headscale <— Machine forwarding the jellyfins port <-- Smart TV
This can be done with a command like this:
ssh -L 0.0.0.0:8096:jellyfin_tailnet_ip:8096 -f -N user@machine
Most people are not gonna go that route unfortunately. I want to love JF, but the remote access is a big sticking point, especially for non tech relatives.
It bugs me when people just say tailscale like that solves it all. It’s very useful and solves a lot of problems, but not all. Unfortunately.
I completely agree, Tailscale will not just solve your issues. If you want to have is as simple as possible for your users you are going to need to expose it publicly for your users. And the reason I posted the comment above is to share a solution that has worked for me to get my users "Smart"TVs to work. Honestly if someone where to make a service that provides a “plex networking” solution for jellyfin I think allot of people would consider using it and leave plex for good!
My mom lives 900 miles away and she can barely turn a computer on
I set up a free dns from duckdns.org and pointed it to my jellyfin server. All my parents had to do was to use that https://randomserver.duckdns.org/ as the server url in the jellyfin app.
Doesn’t that mean your jellyfin server is directly exposed to the Internet? The very thing everyone constantly warns against?
I’m still on Plex, one of my biggest hangups with JF is that the remote access is kludgy
It’s been running on caddy + duckdns for 5 years or more now. I use a non standard jellyfin port for the port forwarding, so that probably helps. Also, there’s probably an aspect of security by obscurity.
Yeah then this might not be a great idea for you, unless you have the possibility to fix a machine if you visit. But I want to make it clear this is not a fix all thing just trying to help :D
<3
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
How do you go about doing that?
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on
Tailscale truly could not be easier/simpler.
Not for all clients, like Roku for example.
Yes the solution is different hardware, like a Google TV, older firestick, raspAP, or flash openwrt on a router. But that’s no longer plug and play and may have other caveats. Besides costing money.
No shade, it’s just not QUITE that simple every time.
How does Plex get around that? I’ve only ever used jellyfin.
Plex operates TURN servers
Don’t selfhost if you think a reverse proxy is tricky.
You shouldn’t even have Jellyfin on a reverse proxy, because it shouldn’t be externally available. There are several known security vulnerabilities (all marked as “closed” due to inactivity on git) that the devs have said will likely never be patched. Because patching them requires breaking away from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on.
It should only be externally available via a private VPN. And that alone excludes a lot of “I want to share my library with friends/family” scenarios, because step 0 will be getting their devices connected to your VPN.
At the very least, set up some form of access control/username+PW directly on your reverse proxy as a secondary security measure. Because if you can reach the JF landing page, you can exploit those vulnerabilities without needing a valid JF login. So you should configure your reverse proxy to act as a gatekeeper, and ensure attackers can’t even reach JF at all without having a valid login to your reverse proxy. But this will break most JF apps (except for browsers) because they likely won’t have any way to give an initial user+pass to the reverse proxy before they hit the JF server.
Theres not a single high risk security issue in there as far i can see. Can you point them out?
That seems like a rather arrogant tone to take. Reverse proxies are complicated. Easy to set up, but challenging to configure depending on what your needs are. Not everyone wants a homelab.
Everyone’s journey starts somewhere and sometimes people’s needs just don’t extend beyond the easier choices available.
There are literaly zero limitations by Jellyfin to remotely access your media. You are free to access your instance in any way you want. Fuck plex
Can’t you just setup a dyndns and port forwarding?
Yes, and if that falls within your risk tolerance it’s rather easy to set up.
Most of the people in the discussion here don’t want to open a port to the internet.
To be fair Plex also requires open ports (or worse upnp) to remotly stream at full quality, without transcoding.
Oh, 100%. I was just trying to sum up the feelings in here.
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
But also benefits of both, reduced cost with easier remote setup, while simultaneously not being plex
Wait, does emby do remote access similar to Plex? And without VPN like JF? That’s literally the only thing keeping me on Plex.
Yeah, via an Emby Connect account through their server infrastructure for the initial connection.
Does This Mean My Streaming is Passing Through the Cloud?
No, all connections are direct from your devices to your Emby Server. The sole purpose of the Emby Connect feature is to help your devices locate your Emby Server so that you don’t have to set it up yourself.I used it in the past, but moved off when I started self-hosting more than Emby. I now have a cheap VPS at Digital Ocean and a Pangolin droplet to handle any web apps that I need to share a remote connection for (like Emby and Jellyseerr), without having to bother with VPN setup. Works like a Cloudflare Tunnel, but without the cloudflare crap.
So basically if I slap emby on an open port, and point my domain to my IP, it’ll work just the same. Connect is just for people without static IP addresses?
I ask because most people say you can’t put JF on an open port and call it good. Not safe.
Emby is based on jf from years ago. Is it safe?
Pretty much.
But… I mean… that’s not the right thing to do for proper security. You would be 100% reliant on user passwords and the devs fixing any security issues like remote code execution or privilege escalation in a timely manner, and you updating after that release comes. Now if Emby is running in a container like docker, or on a dedicated system, you have backups, etc. then even if someone got in there’s not much they could realistically do other than watch your media.
But realistically, you won’t have issues doing it that way in the real world unless you’re already being targeted for some reason.
Emby is based on jf from years ago.
That’s backwards… Jellyfin was forked from Emby in 2018. Both have been developed separately since then, and are still very similar.
I only personally have experience with jellyfin, but the docs of Emby look to support the same remote access as Plex (without the TURN server).
So essentially you can use a login instead of a server IP, but it does require port forwarding or upnp on your router - which you may already have enabled.
Also you dont have to be lumped in with the frothing at the mouth Jellyfin users.
Beats frothing for a company, if I gotta froth
It’s only frothing if you insist that installing tailscale on your grandma’s DSL modem is the best way to share home movies
Plenty of frothing about how jellyfin is a non starter because all 47 of my grandparents can’t stream Snakes On A Plane from my server without needing to know how to spell internet.
Funny enough I’m in the “open it to the wan just practise basic web access hygiene” camp, I hope that makes me at least a little frothy
At this point if I were to switch from Plex I would go with Emby just because a bunch of sweaty nerds don’t simp over it every time Plex comes up in the news.
Look at me guys, I’m contrarian! Look! Look!
Ironically, this kind of response is exactly what I’m talking about.
I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.
That’s why I’m running both. I use jellyfin, everyone else uses Plex 🤣
If you can spin up a podman container, you can use a caddyfile. Hell, if you can nano and read, you can set uo a caddyfile.
Agree. I went directly with Jellyfin because I joined late the party, but never regret it.
So can’t comment on Plex, because I never used it. But I see the news and see the enshittified path it’s going on with Plex
I understand that they need revenue, specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home. I also understand why people is mad, but I guess convenience come with a price, of you don’t want to pay for it, there are alternatives I don’t see anything bad in switching to jellyfin.
They don’t provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.
There’s a relay but it limits the bandwidth allowed through. It can’t be that expensive to run.
specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home.
Why would Plex need to do that? I can access my Jellyfin and outside of my home just fine without someone else acting as a middle man.
I don’t know much about Plex but I guess because it is not easy for the average guy. Setting up a remote connection without a VPN is definitely not something I would recommend to someone who is just a media enthusiast.
Isn’t that the plesk added value?
I got the Plex lifetime pass like 10 years ago, but just switched to Jellyfin over the weekend. It felt like every week Plex was asking me to re-pick my home page list and just insisted on re-adding their live streaming junk. Got tired of it. Reverse proxy is not hard to set up, and while there’s some encoding kinks to work out, it’s not like Plex was immune to those problems either.
The best part is that, if you’re on the fence, you can just run both. That’s what I did at first, but I’ve since let plex die.
I ran both for a while as well. Then decided I preferred Jellyfin.
I only use it locally though didn’t have to set up remote access.
At least Jellyfin let’s you work out the encoding kinks, and set stuff up the way you want.
Meanwhile if plex has central issues transcoding stops working because they force check plex servers for new profiles every time a transcode starts, and if the check fails it just hangs forever (assuming it has Internet access but specifically can’t access the plex url with the transcode profiles. Also this might be solved now but it was a problem just a few months ago)
I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
I use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can’t just “connect”. But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn’t much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
“tailscale might enshittify in the future” is honestly a poor argument against “plex is enshittified right now”
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
You must be new here (Lemmy).
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
Headscale will still work if Tailscale goes to shit.
Yeah I just set up Headscale via YuNoHost recently
So far so good. Might actually consider setting up Jellyfin now that I have a better, and freer remote access solution in place.
Plex is just so goddamn convenient sometimes
I also want to make sure that people connecting can ONLY access jellyfin. And I keep hearing about its own security flaws.
I don’t trust people connecting to themselves not be compromised by someone else, for one thing.
FWIW, Tailscale is a private company that’s been doing well, so it hasn’t been going down the enshittification route yet. There’s also headscale, which they support and which will serve as the canary in the mine if they ever start souring the deal.
Meanwhile, I see no reason not to use a perfectly good service just because it might be gone someday.
I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don’t have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
So you have wireguard connecting to the VPS and a port open on the VPS for the jellyfin client to connect to?
Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.
I wrote about my setup last month; https://the.unknown-universe.co.uk/home-lab/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/
I access it via NPM the same as I access most of the rest of my services. As far as I’ve been able to tell, unauthenticated viewing can happen on Jellyfin, but the person trying to access it will need to know the path that Jellyfin uses to access the media. If you already know my internal file paths, you can watch it from my server I suppose.
I quit using Plex for my own enjoyment a year or two ago when my work decided to block Plex.tv, I can still reach my personal server as it’s accessible to the internet, but I cannot login as that requires being able to access Plex’s authentication servers. At least with Jellyfin I can use my own Authentik instance for auth.
What’s NPM in this case?
nginx proxy manager if I had to guess
Nginx Proxy Manager, really any reverse proxy would be fine, but I’m partial to Nginx.
Ah! Yes, I’m partial to nginx too. Lovely stuff 🙂
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video
From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I’ve had no issues. I am the only user of my network.
I use NetBird and have zero issues.
NetBird is… VPN?
Yeah. Zero trust VPN, akin to tailscale or cloudflare tunnels.
If it’s just you using it setting up VPN is an easy solution. I just use wireguard. If you have a pic you can run pivpn which is just wireguard.
I use Zerotier, free tier, fairly easy to set up.
Oh nice! I have that. Haven’t touched it in a while. But I’ll check it out!
Most of the plex enshitification can also just be turned off in the settings. I’ve got all the ad stuff and suggestions off and its just the core plex experience left.
I understand the authors reasons, but for me personally, having paid for the app, I’ll use it until it no longer suits my needs. Right now it does early what I need and does not cause me any issues. As soon as the enshittification hits me though, I’ll abandon it for something else. I also would not recommend someone purchase it, given the new pricing, and the availability of free alternatives. Had they been there when I paid for Plex, I’d be using them instead.
Yeah, Jellyfin has treated us well, there has been some oofing with some features, however overall it’s been really good!
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
mpd server. Although mainly, so I can use the beautifully named ncmpdcpp client
If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it’s UI is significantly better than stable.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
I’ve been considering audiomuse, but I have old equipment available.
My options are my media server, which is an old Xeon E3-1275v3 with 32G of RAM, which also hosts Navidrome, my arr stack and the associated downloaders, or my Home Assistant and Jellyfin box, which is a Lenovo M700 Tiny which is an i5 6600T but has only 8G of ram.
Or, an 8G Pi5 with an SSD (using the pi SSD hat)
I’m not sure either of those 3 options would handle audiomuse AI all that well…
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
——
Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
That’s cool to know, however the Xeon runs FreeBSD, so I would need to create a VM if it doesn’t work in Linuxulator, (FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, works sorta like wine does)
I have 120k tracks. I like music.
I should do some research this weekend I reckon.
Great, now I have one more thing I gotta do this weekend. Thanks a lot. Lmao.
So.
I did a thing.
I have audiomuse-ai running its main, complete docker compose script, with all containers, on my 8GB Raspi5, and worker-only containers running on:
- An 8GB bhyve VM on my FreeBSD box
- An E2-6110 AMD pre-ryzen APU with 16GB of ddr3
- A Ryzen 5800x w 32GB RAM
They’ve been running about a week, and I’m a little over a third of the way through
Once the initial analysis is complete, I’ll stop all worker containers and leave it all just running fully on the pi5.
I also created a worker-only addon for the 6600T machine, but as it is already running HAOS and Jellyfin, I was getting a lot of OOM-related failures when it was running.
But I also have 32G of used, eBay bought, ddr4 SODIMMs.coming for it.
Bonus: Most of my homelab is in this. The only things missing are my Sophos running OPNsense, and the raspi5. Oh, and my actual desktop machine.
Yo, that’s awesome!
Pro tip for you, ASR (whisper - lyric detection/transcription) can be kind of bad, but if you have some spare resources, it takes very little to host a local LRCLIB database and clone lrclib.net (they have a GitHub page). This massively speed up lyric analysis for me using the API against a local site instead of getting 429s against lrclib.net or relying on ASR.
Lyrics are the biggest longest part of the scans. My whole collection was like 3+ weeks with lyrics stuff on, but only 2 days with just MusiCNN and CLAP.
I was bored. I’m not running it in a docker VM any more. I am now running it directly on FreeBSD using podman and FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer.
I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
Does Volumio suit your needs? I haven’t used Plex audio to compare
Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.
I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).
I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.
I’m not sure about those devices, but with a paid account it unlocks speaker grouping and casting to various devices or rooms, or play here on current device function. I don’t have their device, just a raspberry pi with the OS.
I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. They support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.
Nice.
I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.
Yeah thats the main problem for me, Ive run both Jellyfin and Plex in the past when plex used to charge users to watch on mobile. but Jellyfin Id always have to help create their account, show them how to add my domain and stuff, only for them to need help again a month down the line when they want to use it.
Now that plex got rid of that whole mobile charge stuff if the server owner has a plex pass it made it much simpler.
it is still annoying when adding a new user showing them how to disable all the ad supported stuff but usually its a one time thing, after that if they forget their password or whatever its between them and plex. plus plex is much simpler as far as I know when your users also start to run servers, they just invite you back and you have access to everything on one account
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #5 for this comm, first seen 8th Jun 2026, 12:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot
I was using Synology’s video server software. They had an app for android and IOS. Then Synology killed it and the only options were plex or Jellyfin. I bought into Synology because of their remote connection options. When I tried Plex they were making me pay per connected device. No way! Jellyfin became my only option at that point.
There’s also Emby. And some other options.
You dont have to pay Plex per connected device, but you do have to pay something somewhere for remote streaming.
You used to have to pay for the mobile apps (though, not per device but per apple/google account) a while ago, maybe the previous poster was talking about that.
A family of 4 plus a tablet…each Google account required payment as did the ipad…so for me it was each device
hmm I wonder if it’s because of the recent subscription hike … hmmmm
intense HMMMM
Funny timing, I’ve been playing with Jellyfin lately too and I ended up forking a little project to bridge Plex into Jellyfin: https://github.com/ndieschburg/xtream-to-strm-web
It syncs your Plex.tv libraries (even shared servers you don’t own) into .strm and .nfo files, so Jellyfin just picks them up as a normal library and you can watch everything from any Jellyfin client. There’s a built-in proxy that hides the Plex tokens from the STRM files, and for clients that don’t follow HTTP redirects (like Findroid) there’s an HLS proxy mode so it still plays fine.
Still a bit rough but it does the job if you want to keep a single Jellyfin frontend and still reach the stuff that only lives on Plex.
I just want an Apple TV app for Jellyfin then I’ll switch.
Looks like I got weekend plans
Damn it’s a missed opportunity to call it Pectin
I use Infuse and have found it to be nice. I wish it supported music though.
Neptune is amazing
Apple TV
Well you really fucked it there, friend
I mean, in terms of raw capability, it’s actually one of the better “turn a dumb TV into a smart TV” devices on the market. It has good hardware transcoding support to take the burden off of your server. It also has very little in the way of fluff. It was one of the few boxes that wasn’t packed full of ads by default (though I’m not sure if this is still true).
But yeah, it means you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem. Which is… Not always the best. Apple is notoriously difficult/annoying if your app gets tied up in approvals, so native apps can sometimes be trapped in limbo for a while. And that’s assuming they even allow the native app.
I guess you could build an HTPC with similar functionality and hardware support, but then you’ll be stuck using a Bluetooth keyboard to navigate things, plus all of the “oh let me wait for my computer to boot up before I can watch anything” pains that go along with it. There are solutions for a lot of the complaints, but a lot of them are fiddly or require lots of extra stuff just to achieve the same basic functionality of “remote has power button that turns on TV and streaming box, and navigates menus as if it’s a native app.”
I had an Nvidia shield, but I couldn’t stand the newer Home Screen filled with ads. I like the peaceful quiet of the Apple TV Home Screen. Also picture quality is pretty great. I don’t need to side load apps cause I was using Plex for a decade for all my media needs, plus my in-laws know how to use it when they watch my kids. Win all around.
I have both, Apple TV 4K and Shield TV Pro, both have strengths and weaknesses. Being able to use my AirPods with one click on the ATV is super nice, I also use it for Apple Music (with Atmos). The Shield is more capable, I am using Projectivy Launcher, autostart Plex on boot and it just works with all the codecs I ever needed. The ads are bad, but Android still allows you to change the Launcher (you only have to uninstall the stock launcher with
adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 <package>).
JellySee is great IMO - costs 8 or 9 credits though it’s worth it because it’s a one time purchase
If you want a quick fix you can always airplay from an iphone.
Presently “continue watching” is gone for me in android. I can’t seem to avoid all these stupid “recommendations”, and lately I find I’ve been using jellyfin more and more. I have run them in tandem for years.
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