Captain Janeway

TBF if you want, you can have a bastion server which is solely whitelisted by IP to stream your content from your local server. It’s obviously a pivot point for hackers, but it’s the level of effort that 99% of hackers would ignore unless they really wanted to target you. And if you’re that high value of a target, you probably shouldn’t be opening any ports on your network, which brings us back to your original solution.

I, too, don’t expose things to the public because I cannot afford the more safe/obfuscated solutions. But I do think there are reasonable measures that can be taken to expose your content to a wider audience if you wanted.

I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I’m going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It’s not like I’m serving a bunch of other clients. But I’ll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.

In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)

So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.

Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/

It’s not a requirement to stream and it’s sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it’s a direct connection to my server, it should be free.

That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:

We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.

And they should have built their architecture in a way that’s easy to decouple the two services.

That’s true for PC gaming but might not be true for these NUCs. I’m not an expert but I wouldn’t be surprised if they shaved costs with bulk purchases of RAM and SSDs for these devices. Regardless, I was just addressing a point you made about being forced to buy the components yourself which isn’t the case. Pricing is probably going to vary wildly depending on what you pick and you might be able to save money if you’re ok with less RAM or less storage.

You shouldn’t have to pick it all separately. Some Nucs are “barebones” and others come with RAM, CPU, Storage, etc. This Amazon link purportedly claims to have RAM, SSD, etc. pre-built into the ASUS NUC.

That being said, any NUC’s integrated GPU is likely going to be far superior to the RPi5’s CPU encoding (which I assume was your previous setup).

If you want to spend ~$1000, you might be better off with just going straight for the dedicated NAS.

The app isn’t available on as many platforms. The original comment claimed the TV their MIL uses doesn’t have a Jellyfin app and would require side loading. I would argue that’s a pretty big barrier for most people.

Just to clarify a bit further. You browser doesn’t specify ports in the URL because HTTP and HTTPS have basically coopted the 80/443 ports. You could have a website running an HTTP server on another port like 3000. But then you’d need to specify the port in the URL since the browser - by default - is looking at 80/443 and not 3000.

You should be able to configure the port for your Jellyfin server. I’m not a Jellyfin user, but most applications allow you to pick a port to run it on. So you’ll have to change the port to port 80 and then expose that port on your docker container in the docker-compose file.

Edit: actually now that I think about it… You could just point your local port 80 to the docker container port. I forget the port mapping schema but it’s something like

ports:
  - 80:1234

You might have to flip the order of the ports. But basically that example above is trying to map port 80 to port 1234. If that fails, you might have port 80 being used by another application on your computer and you’d either have to shut that app down, pick a different port for that app or you’re back to picking a different port for Jellyfin