Home-Media Hosts Lost in Plex/Jellyfin Setup
Individuals are struggling to set up and manage their own home media servers, often involving complex software and configurations. They seek guidance on server setup, software integration (Plex, Jellyfin, Radarr, Trakt), storage management, and user access control, frequently encountering technical roadblocks and a lack of coding expertise. The desire to replace cloud storage services fuels this effort.
SOURCES (60)
“To keep it short and sweet for my first post here, Almost a year in, getting things documented better. So far, Media Stack(Plex, Kavita,Retroassembly),Proxmox, Nginx based Webpage, NPM, Pi-Hole, Pomtail/Loki Grafana. Gonna have to make on of the fancy flow charts soon. submitted by /u/dagoth_ith…”
“https://preview.redd.it/okketg3q1eeh1.png?width=1667&format=png&auto=webp&s=dcd7d21dfbf73308949155f905e3c94f3a324d3b the properties look like this ? and i made sure the database is called books👍 I'm not sure i may have messed it up (I'm not much of a reader so its not a big deal )”
“openmediavault with the docker plugin, and run jellyfin as a docker image. It's very beginner friendly and free.”
“Fairly novice user. Have Debian 12 with CASA running Plex and the Arrs. I will be rebuding that with a different PC and going a different route because CASA is no longer supported. I currently have 2 Seagate expansion USB drives (24TB) that I picked up during a closeout when they remodeled my local Walmart. One of them has about 12TB of TV shows on it. Was thinking about removing the drive from the enclosure and putting it in the PC. It is formatted to EXT4 already. Other than mount it, would I”
“I did consider plex to avoid the remote hassle, but the price for lifetime pass was pretty high. Also didn’t feel like getting friends and family to pay for it just so they can have access. Totally get that Jellyfin is more of a hassle that way, but longterm it sounds like a good solution for me if I can get everything to work. Totally get people still using plex tho”
“I dont get this - Is Plex not the go to solution any longer for such projects like this ? https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/?cat=computer&plat=macos”
“Using this on fire TV 4k max gen 1. Plezy is soooo much better than the most recently updated plex client. Honestly the Plex devs could learn something from Plezy.”
“Ok so im pretty new to all this. got casaos running on an old optiplex i had lying around and been poking at umbrel on a pi 4 too. the thing that keeps happening is i install an app and it just wont start. no error or anything, just dead. took me way too long to realize it was a port thing lol. had qbittorrent on 8080, went to add another app that also wanted 8080 and nothing, just sat there doing nothing. same deal anytime two things both want 80. on casaos i can usually find where to change th”
“This seems like the more practical option for now. I can always remux everything later if I decide to build out a proper library.”
“I have Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, and GlueTUN in the stack (sorry idk which exactly is the indexer I’m new to this but I’m trying to point it to limetorrent and 1337x they seem the be the best) and I use Usenet”
“I've been hoarding media for a long time. Longer than I care to think about honestly. At this point the collection is large enough that several of the friends and family members I've shared my Plex server with have cancelled their streaming service subscriptions.After getting laid off a while back, I started working on a degree online. It seemed like a good opportunity to spend some time traveling too, so I signed up for Starlink and got a friend to host my Plex server in his basement for the du”
“You might need to explain your setup better then and where you're actually storing your music I'm speaking as someone who had around 37k mp3 files locally stored on my iPhone before switching to Navidrome. If you're using Navidrome, you're streaming your music from wherever it's stored to each individual phone that has Arpeggi installed. If you add music to wherever it's stored, Navidrome will automatically pick it up as "Recently Added" so it is, in effect (i a”
“Navidrome is a remote server just like plex. But depending on the client you use on your phone you can download the music to play locally”
“i don't think apple's music player sees smb server files, that was all the reason. Maybe my post is confusing, I was wanting to see if the "Pushing" music can be accomplished with a setup, does navindrome have that or is it just a remote server like plex?”
“It works for me with OMDB API. I don’t see any option for MAL API tho, so I can’t test it”
“Love the simplicity of this - grouping similar movies is genuinely useful when you're 20 minutes into scrolling Netflix with decision paralysis. One thought: have you considered adding a "mood" filter alongside the similarity clustering? Like "I want something tense but not horror" or "cozy but not rom-com." That combo of similarity + mood tagging could make this stand out from the dozen other movie finders out there.”
“I run a Plex server for my family however over the past 4-5 years anime has always been a problem. Are there any projects or methods of me being able to automate pulling anime from a site like CR into my *arr stack? Better yet is this possible with any other streaming services. I've tried looking online but I can't find the key term to actually locate anything like this. submitted by /u/Flaxen_Bobcat [link] [comments]”
“Alright I got Aurral (testing branch) working, green all around. I don't think it can manipulate my Plex playlists right?”
“I always thought I was absolutely crazy for wanting to “go full circle” but have been looking for a project like this for ages! Keep going, definitely keeping an eye on this!”
“No.. because its wasteful? Whats the point of having jellyfin setup if you are just going to use a fucking DVD player? Its literally just pointlessly wasteful.”
“Can you imagine actually holding your media? Wouldn't it be so cool if you could have a bookshelf but for movies and music?”
“A friend just told me he doesn't use my Plex/-arr stack, because it doesn't have the features his anime streaming site (anikototv - dot- site) has. Rules don't seem to prevent posting links to sites like these, but I don't want to cause trouble. Features he's looking for (please check the website linked above for exactly what it looks like): Latest episodes : Plex already does that with freshly available content. Just needs to be an anime monitored on Sonarr to get downloaded”
“That's the plan. This tool just seems like it'll reduce to workload in doing so, which is nice.”
“https://preview.redd.it/jg8nscs9u4ch1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=becc24f965f67e0438efe17ac7b4f65e50b6c3ad Working on printable box art too”
“Idk if this counts under self hosted but what’s ur thoughts? It automatically creates the menus and such based on the tv show or movie you select for on your Jellyfin So far it's working pretty well on my Mac Been testing on a spare DVD-RW I had laying around I realize it’s kinda dumb to use Jellyfin to re-create physical media but it’s kinda fun https://github.com/DrewThomasson/JellyDisk submitted by /u/Impossible_Belt_7757 [link] [comments]”
“The media doesn't need to be on SSD (and really shouldn't be unless you have very little media or very much money). You should store things like logs, metadata, and cache on SSD, though. All the seeking and thrashing for the runtime files isn't great for spinning rust performance or longevity. You only need a few GB of space for everything other than the media. You don't mention having any non-SSD storage. You need to put the media somewhere. Even a cheap, shitty USB HD is suffic”
“I'm sure there are people here who will disagree with me but I avoid VPNs or installed tools for public access. Primarily because it's not a great user experience for my users. You could utilize something like Cloudflare Tunnels or Pangolin to expose your local services to the outside world. Just make sure you pair it with solid auth since you're exposing it the public internet. Some of these services include a proxy auth layer as well. So they'd have to log in before ever hittin”
“Currently on my PC, I have the main copy of this 448GB archive of irreplaceable photos/videos of my family in a 14TB WD shucked white label HDD, along with my Plex library and important personal files. I mirror the folder anytime a something is added to an 8TB Ironwolf NAS HDD in the same PC using FreeFileSync. I also have that folder mirrored to a Synology DS220j NAS with another two 4TB Ironwolf HDDs in RAID 1 every couple of weeks and an ADATA HD710 1TB external HDD inside a Pelican case with”
“i want to create my own streaming service, for local network, but i want it to be online. by that i mean that i dont want to install any files except from the videos for the sv. is there any way to do that? submitted by /u/ApprehensiveTopic812 [link] [comments]”
“I want Metube to download my files in mkv format but it won't do it. submitted by /u/Jmesparza05 [link] [comments]”
“Mini updated: Looked at the Roku/Roku Media Player, as a Ultra is $150 which is so far the least expensive and supports USB storage... but the idea of having to open Roku Media Player, browse files by filename isn't pleasing to the eyes.”
“What I want I don't think exists, everything with a good user experience is designed around streaming, so I keep returning to a two device solution. One device on the TV to stream, a second device to host the content. I understand Kodi is there to bridge that, but I have to look at it some more as so far it seems like it's an almost solution, it does it, but doesn't do it where an 80 yo will not have to ask me questions. I'm also going to look more at Streamio but at first glance”
“I'm currently trying to write a yaml file that creates a tailscale jellyfin pair so I can watch my movies remotely. If anyone has already managed to do it, could you post the file or help? submitted by /u/Zealousideal_Heron_3 [link] [comments]”
“EDIT: Im not asking for someone to make this for me, im just asking for advice and suggestions or guidance Im sure most of you have heard of letterbox or tv time for tracking episodes and movies. My partner used the latter. It is going out of business and she is about to lose all of her tracking information. I was originally just gonna make her a simple app to store on her phone locally but thought obsidian might be a good alternative. Ive never worked in plugins or addons for obsidian so any ad”
“You can use an API like me to get millions of movies for your site, this is a good database. submitted by /u/Adeesha_dev [link] [comments]”
“Reinventing the wheel wasn't intended when it all started im November, I started with 2 Jellyfin plugins, then it grew into a few UI tweaks and a plugin, then it grew into a JF client forked from an open source client, then it grew into a React Native client which something I desired for long since you can unify the UI across all platforms, and that's something lacking everywhere and has been achieved, then some time later JF has tightened the door on remote streams which opened the door”
“With the Plex lifetime price increase last week, I have been seeing the same Plex vs Jellyfin debate "Should i buy before they increase the price!?", and of course the cheeky “I got lifetime for $70 so i don't care" comments. Plex still wins on polish, easy remote access, sharing, and apps that family/friends can usually log in and go. but is obviously giving the finger to selfhosters and is only focusing on free/ads content instead of actual clients or features that the commu”
“Would be really cool if you could add an unraid template too. There's a way to add regular docker containers, but their implementation of it is really slick for updates etc. I'll try to spin this up in the meantime the normal way.”
“I have the acestream-scraper-pyacexy conected to Jellyfin. That scraper is slightly better, it has some improvements for refreshing. Jellyfin manages the m3u and is working really great.”
“This is exactly the kind of setup that works until one tiny bottleneck turns the whole thing into a headache”
“I had this setup a while ago, except I could never find a reliable acestrean source. The main issue is that Plex is not great with channels changing. My recommendation would be to create a fixed number of channels in Dispatcharr and if you have multiple sources for a single channel add them all in Dispatcharr. If you do not re-hash the channels in Dispatcharr then Plex should work. If the number of channels changes in Dispatcharr or in the hash changes you will need to delete and re-add them to”
“Hi all! With the WorldCup on the way, i'm strugelling with my current setup: 1- AceScrapper https://github.com/Pipepito/acestream-scraper (scraps ace links from urls and provides a M3U to Dispatcharr) 2- Dispatcharr https://github.com/dispatcharr/dispatcharr (converts this m3U to HDhomerun for plex to read) 3- Plex 😄 it does sort of work for a day.. but when link changes or channels change, it all breaks. Can anyone recomend any better setup ? submitted by /u/uniextra [link] ”
“The DXP4800 looks decent as hardware for the price. I’d treat the box and the software as separate choices though. If you keep Ugreen’s OS, check that it does what you want for backups, Plex/Jellyfin and disk monitoring. If you wipe it for Unraid or TrueNAS, assume a bit more setup and less vendor help. With 10TB + 20TB mixed drives, Unraid is worth a look because it wastes less capacity than a classic RAID/ZFS layout. TrueNAS is good, but it is less forgiving if you are still changing the drive”
“I'm trying to install Jellyfin doing a custom install so I can direct it to the right folders for movies and TV shows... but it says this port is in use. This is a clean install of Zorin and Jellyfin is the first app I'm trying to install. Any guidance on what I need to do would be greatly appreciated! https://preview.redd.it/rvyh7360exah1.png?width=815&format=png&auto=webp&s=d4a96a6f0bc47ae754c89c16332cfaae50c30b49 submitted by /u/mossfoot [link] [comments]”
“Hi I am making a home media server and set up jellyfin. It buffers while playing some of the media files .The weird thing is same quality but different show doesn’t buffer it’s instant in both outside my homenetwork though Tailscale and homework . For context I have a 900Mbps upload bandwidth so it shouldn’t be bandwidth issues and I have a dedicated rtx 3060 for transcoding. I did everything like passing the gpu through docker and it works .(I know it’s overkill but got it for £90). But for som”
“Hello, I want to preface this by saying I'm a complete novice and don't really know much about this stuff. Anyways, I've been locally hosting a jellyfin server off of my pc for a few months and have amassed about 14tb of media. Now I've been looking into getting a nas to have a proper home server but I've run into the issue that the nas would have to reformat my drives and I don't really know what my options are to bring all my media over without losing it. Any suggestion”
“Hey all, I'm pretty new to this topic and this sub hope you understand. I had an idea the other day that I could take my external drive and plug it into my Android TV 14 to make a poor man's NAS since I'm low on funds but want to give the project a shot. So far I've been able to transfer files via the FTP server app within my local network which is pretty cool. The issue I'm facing is trying to add TailScale so I can transfer files outside my local network. I have my devices”
“I have been building out a self hosted stack for each media type in my homelab to escape subscriptions and cut costs down to $0. Movies and shows, covered by Jellyfin + arr stack. Books/audiobooks covered by calibre + arr, and even adult content covered by Stash + my own automated built system. What I haven't been able to figure out yet is replacing YouTube Premium, which keeps increasing in cost for little to no value. I use both YouTube Music and YouTube daily for watching YouTube and list”
“My two cents since you seem to be openly looking for opinions. Start out with what you've got. I'm currently running Emby (extremely similar to jellyfin) on a 10yr old laptop with a 4tb USB HDD connected to it. But I'm only running it for my own household and a few close family members outside my house. Most I'll generally ever see are 2-3 simultaneous streams. Due to using h.264 mostly I almost never have need of transcoding. For those purposes it runs fine and really my only re”
“Go back and read your original post, you never mentioned public domain anywhere. You said you want to use Radarr and qBittorrent to “very legally acquire” media for Plex/Navidrome, starting from zero owned discs or albums. Your question wasn’t about accessing public domain content. Something very easy to do. Go look at internet archive for that. You were asking how to automate downloading movies and music you don’t own. I never said BitTorrent itself was illegal. I said the majority of media peo”
“You don't have to use the Jellyfin client to play media hosted on Jellyfin if that's what you are asking.”
“I got some advice here earlier about setting up a basic home server, but have run into an unexpected problem with using Jellyfin. I'd been using it on my PC beforehand to get used to it and had no problem setting up the Library to connect to an external SSD. I've managed to get ZimaOS installed, the client on my PC installed, transerred the SSD to the Zima system, was able to access the SSD and play the movies from Zima fine. Then I got Jellyfin installed... and for some reason i can'”
“The problem is the licensing issue, my friend... The app is a one-time, lifetime payment!”
“Not sure why you are getting down voted. Plexamp is actually pretty easy especially for a non Linux user and a good suggestion. I'd say to OP, just try them all. Navidrome, Jellyfin, Swing Music, Plex/Plexamp, etc.. They are easy to install use and try. Just point at your music folder and go. Personally I use and prefer Navidrome after trying them all out, but you may come to a different conclusion for what works for you.”