Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so.

0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.

View on HN

I guess this applies to a relatively small subset of population who are always on the riad and travelling for work.

One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.

It means access from anywhere.

Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.

You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.

You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.

To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).

I guess we are a different breed. I didn't even knew there were TV in gym clubs (I am exercising outside, never understood paying for exercising either). I don't really understand why someone would be so little engaged on his exercising/training/sport that they would need a screen to entertain themselves to be honest.

That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.

> I am exercising outside

Doing deadlifts outside when it's -30C is pretty hardcore.

Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.

Well I'll give a pass to those who live in Siberia, Ulaanbataar or anywhere else with permafrost then ;-)

My experience in cold places, especially those with a lot of snow and ice, is that there are usually enough chores to do that skipping deadlifts day is not really a problem though.

> Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.

I guess that is the difference between running or cycling outside and doing it on a machine.

If exercise was pleasant you wouldn't have to remind people to do more of it. The only thing worse than running for an hour is running for an hour and actually paying attention to the complaints your body is sending while doing so.

I can do all of this stuff with my Jellyfin server for the yearly cost of a domain name

This thread was a "why does remote access matter", not a comparison of Jellyfin and Plex.

I run both and Jellyfin is very clearly an open source project.

By that I mean that the interesting technical problem (streaming) is implemented rather well and there is a UI that technically has buttons to expose the things it does while simultaneously not being good at many of the things people use Plex for.

Jellyfin's remote access story is "set up a VPN or Tailscale". Plex's remote access story is "it works".

Jellyfin's story for accessing content from multiple servers doesn't exist. Neither does a global auth system for sharing access to your library, having friends, etc.

Jellyfin's sorting, filtering, and searching are just OK. Its web UI is nowhere near as nice for libraries of O(1000).

Real world example: I was at an AirBnB last week that had a Roku TV. To get to my Plex library I installed the Plex app. There was a Jellyfin app but I couldn't use it because there was no VPN client for the TV, and I don't feel the need to set up and run Tailscale when I already have Wireguard.

I use a reverse proxy for Jellyfin remote access, people saying you need a VPN or Tailscale (which is also a VPN) are unnecessarily paranoid IMO. That said, I'm a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience and a lifelong tinkerer, and I've set up an OpenWRT One as my primary router, so my firewall is more up to date and useful than 99% of consumers and I'm comfortable restoring a PC if it gets hacked.

But maybe more importantly IMO, Jellyfin doesn't have a central server that would serve as a high-priority target for hackers. Plex may have funding and full-time devs, but they're also relying on security through obscurity, which is hardly best-practice. Their central servers were hacked 10 months ago and passwords were leaked. For that to happen to me, hackers would have to be interested in my little Intel N100-powered server running from my house with maybe 10 daily active users. On top of that, Jellyfin's team have generally been quite fast at addressing all known high severity vulnerabilities because the project is open source. Everyone can see the code, so anyone can fix an exploit as soon as it's found.

As far as sharing access with my friends, I just ask them to put in the username/password they'd like on my phone in person for account creation, then I text them all the details about the URL for my Jellyfin instance, how to set up their smart TV app for it, etc.

I can access my Jellyfin instance from almost any smart TV in the world with the official apps because I followed their official guide and set up with a reverse proxy instead of Tailscale.

So on vacation you just come to the hotel room and fall on the bed. First thing you do when you wake up is leave the room?

Seems like you don't need hotels, a hostel would work just fine :D

Some of us need to unwind even on "vacation". Just get your feet up and watch your shows and relax before hitting the sack.

Well usually if I am on vacation that is not to stare at walls but to visit, enjoy the place I am visiting and and experience stuff so yes I usually only come back to the hotel room either to wash/change myself or to sleep and/or have sex.

Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?

Maybe different people vacation differently.

Maybe that's OK.

Vacation is also transit, a Mariot here a Hilton there. I watch content curated by me or YouTube.

What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??

In my experience there are never enough towel racks or they aren't wide enough for the towel and the bathroom ventilation is usually set to stop automatically when you close the door.

Hotel electronics do not have feelings so I don't really think that the monster qualification applies, and they are probably ok anyway as they are so rarely used and have time to dry before being powered on thanks to the aircon helping maintaining a dry air. I don't think the actual electrical components do suffer from a lot of moisture from the towel.

You can't know for certain that modern AI-imbedded electronics aren't sentient and humidity-averse... YOU MONSTER!

You can do that with Jellyfin and Tailscale trivially on devices you own; for a hotel TV you can use a GL.iNet travel router (which will also let you access your LAN from any device connected to it) and it's all free (except for the router of course, that you just buy once).

How are you going about installing Jellyfin on random hotel TVs? None of the hotels I've stayed at have that level of freedom on their TVs.

(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)

If there is a browser then that's all that's needed. Just point it to the LAN IP of your Jellyfin install.

Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it.

I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.

However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.

I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.

I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).

The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.

Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.

Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.

Yeah I would definitely need to look into some kind of real time transcoding setup (jellyfin, etc) if I had a use case for remote watching of things on any other less-capable platforms, particularly that can't handle x265 or AV1 encoded things.

Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).

> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.

That's definitely a consideration, and I'm not watching 72GB 3-hour length 4K movies remotely if the far end's internet connection is insufficient. But the times that I find myself in such a place are fairly uncommon these days. If I were spending a lot of time in places where Internet service was considerably worse than where I travel now, I would probably just download the 1080p, HEVC/x265, 2.2GB total file size version of a movie and call that "ehh, good enough".

If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.

In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.

After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.

The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com