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I am very late to the Media Library game, having amassed quite a bit of "stuff" (which I do not feel too terribly about giving the propensity of that stuff to vanish from streaming services), but I keep wanting to construct a kind of "TV channel," wherein multiple logged-in users can see the exact thing at (nearly) the same time.

I would manage the queue myself. This way, I could host watch parties of hard-to-find material, perhaps with intermission material ("let's all go to the lobby" or other nostalgia). Plex, from what I read, seems to be heading in a more legal direction, and Emby closed its source ...

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Jellyfin supports "Watch parties" which I've used for movie nights in the past. It works well enough.

But if you want this going real-time and continuously it sounds like you want more of an RTMP stream setup. I recommend MovieNight[0] but you can handle it natively in Nginx I think. Then it's just a matter of setting up OBS[1] or something similar to stream to it and you can do whatever you want.

[0] https://github.com/zorchenhimer/MovieNight [1] https://obsproject.com/

That's interesting. We have the chat part already set up in Discord.

I had heard of the OBS Project but I wasn't sure if it would handle my somewhat specific use case.

I know Jellyfin had been working on a feature called SyncPlay but I didn't know how far it had gotten in various clients yet. Out of curiosity, why would you like an RTMP stream setup over Jellyfin in my case? What are the pros and cons?

(I know wanting to set up my own little TV channel for a dozen people is kind of a silly thing to do, but that's the itch I have)

Ah, sorry, SyncPlay is the watch party feature I was thinking of. I know it's available in the web client (what we used) and the Android app.

RTMP gives you lower latency and more control over what's being shown when combined with OBS. Jellyfin's SyncPlay works great when you want to watch a shared movie with a set group of people, but it gets buggy when you watch multiple episodes in a row or people drop in and out. Doing OBS with RMTP (I used MovieNight) means it's just one continuous stream that people tune in to. You can use OBS to queue up arbitrary video files, and with different scenes set up you can even do bumpers and "commercials".

And it's definitely not silly! I used an RTMP stream to do a "Saturday Morning Cartoons" stream for my friends a while back.

It sounds like your use case and mine are very similar. That sounds fantastic! How well does this handle user authentication/authorization? Are the clients widespread enough?

This is definitely going on my Potential Solutions list, which has been interesting to navigate, to say the least.

Jellyfin supports all the major platforms[0] to some degree. The web client is definitely the most polished though. I've only used web, Android, and Kodi; Kodi being the flakiest. RTMP is a very well supported protocol, you can watch it in browser or throw the URL at pretty much any given media player and it'll work.

For user auth, Jellyfin has it's built in db and I have it hooked up to an LDAP server with authorization for a certain OU. RTMP I never tried to restrict, though if you use the nginx/apache method you probably use .htaccess or something similar?

[0]: https://jellyfin.org/clients/

RTMP is looking really interesting for this. And your cartoon use case matches something I had been considering. Thank you!

If you're using nginx-rtmp-module auth is actually extremely easy: use the on_play and on_publish callback directives[1] to implement whatever auth you want, a la [2][3].

[1] https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/wiki/Directives#on...

[2] https://github.com/Nesseref/nginx-rtmp-auth/blob/master/pyth...

[3] https://github.com/Nesseref/nginx-rtmp-auth/blob/master/pyth...

Ooooh! Neat!

CyTube has performed well as a synchronized watch party. Though it was tricky to install and the UI was quirky.

There's a Plex approach to this, in fact.

https://github.com/FakeTV/pseudo-channel

There are many forks of this, namely ErsatzTV[0] which also supports Jellyfin

[0] https://github.com/jasongdove/ErsatzTV

Thank you both, this gives me additional options for my search space.

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