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Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.

But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.

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Is Plex/jellyfin even necessary for Infuse? I've been using Infuse for years now and it has direct access to my NAS to look for media content and just directly plays it. It's a such an amazing app and it plays everything I throw at it without any buffering or transcoding issues. The Pro version pretty much has all the necessary codecs, including all the dolby things for hdr/atmos. It just works so well.

Yeah I have Infuse only, and am happy with it. No need for jellyfin or whatever else. Honestly Infuse may be one of my best app purchases of these past 10 years…

For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose

Crazy expensive though. It's basically a Plex subscription, just for the player.

Isn’t it something like $10/yr or something?

Yep. Worth every cent. The Apple TV experience of Infuse is night and day with Plex. I used to constantly struggle with Plex buffering and crashing on my local network with the Apple TV app. Infuse just points to a file share on my NAS and streams beautifully, even at larger 4K files.

I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.

It's not as bad as I thought/misremembered. $23/year here in Denmark, and $140/lifetime.

I just bought a lifetime pro access , I think it was around 200$ but really worth it. I get all the updates for free.

Whenever I can, I buy my software now these days instead of renting it.

It seems like a strange juxtaposition to talk about buying vs. renting while getting updates for free.

Not as expensive as a Starbucks habit

There is also an open source tvOS client called Swiftfin. The experience isn't as good though.

You can also transcode your files to formats that the free version of Infuse supports if you are a miser.

Best to specify the formats you can play in the *arr tools than rely on client transcoding. I aim for media I can direct play and the filters in radarr and sonarr make that pretty easy. I also use tdarr to clean up / convert things I couldn't get a direct play file for.

... and is awesome even without Jellyfin - I have it installed on all devices including Apple TV, connected to family NAS through webdav.

>But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

I'm confused about this bit. I installed jellyfin to provide outside access to me and my family/friends.

It wasn't difficult to make it available on the 'net, setting up new users is pretty simple and jellyfin has clients (both first and third party) for most platforms.

In fact, I went from never having used jellyfin to giving external access to friends/family within a few hours.

I'm sure I'm missing something, so if you wouldn't mind, I'd be very interested to hear your experience.

I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

>I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

Fair enough. IME, Jellyfin and (just as importantly -- at least for me) the distribution (Fedora) I use have been very good at patching/releasing updates to both the clients and servers when vulnerabilities are found.

Initially, I stuffed jellyfin (and a bunch of other stuff) behind HAProxy[0], which was fine. Now I don't even bother.

It's been at least three years since I put up my jellyfin server and haven't had any issues at all.

All that said, I understand your trepidation and am glad you found something that works for you!

[0] https://www.haproxy.org/

I have the exact same setup. I found Infuse a PITA to begin with. Now it works pretty dang well, even remotely. One big irritation though is the subtitles are always on by default, on Apple TV it's an issue as I can't find a way to disable the default haha! Sometimes there is also a delay between when Jellyfin can play a new video in the browser and when Infuse can play it even though it can see the file.

I do find Infuse significantly better than the Jellyfin apps though.

Jellyfin works just fine with remote access and multiple users.

I don't trust Jellyfin to be secure enough to be put on the public Internet.

Why is that? Did you have an issue with how it's set up? Or does it not do enough out of the box and leaves security for the administrator?

I use port forwarding on my home router to open up jellyfin to outside access. it's not as pretty, but it works.

tailscale + cloudflare for lets encrypt support. can then give family tailscale access

Has cloudfare become any more strict with passing large amounts of video data through them? I heard they were kind of against it, but haven't enforced anything.

If you don't proxy or tunnel the connection, it isn't an issue. I assume they are using Tailscale for the actual connection.

One does not need cloudflare for letsencrypt. The tooling has become really simple to use.

You do need a DNS service with API access for automatically creating/renewing the certificates for things that are only served over tailscale though, since they aren't publicly accessible for the letsencrypt servers to talk to.

I've got a Caddy instance setup which proxies my traffic and has dead easy integration for domain DNS registration. Super handy

Same, it's fantastic. As long as you don't need to support as many requests per second on your hardware as something like NGINX could, Caddy is the way to go.

Caddy is great, but doesn't solve the problem I was talking about on its own.

Caddy will get SSL certs automatically if it is exposed to the internet and DNS for that domain points to it, but if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME. There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

> There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

Yea, for clarity this is what i was describing. I use Porkbun's API and the Caddy instance isn't reachable from the internet, only local and over tailscale

I think you overestimate the technical capabilities of my family or their eagerness to install software. When I ran Plex, and nobody ever installed the Plex app like I recommended to them, even though it's one click away in all the app stores.

I mean, if they aren't even willing to download the one app that actually gets them the content they want to see, then *no* software will ever be something that this type of user will be interested in. Not everyone has to use an app, so why try and cater to an audience who clearly has zero interest? You're not gonna magically make it somehow even easier than "go to app store, download app" to the point that they'll use any piece of software.

No, the browser version of Plex is much simpler because you can just send a link. The receiver only needs to go through a simple "type your email and password" sign-up process, and that's it. Nothing to install, works everywhere.

Tailscale is exponentially worse, though. Not only would I have ask them to go to Jellyfin and sign up and log in, I would have to explain that they can't do that until they've installed the Tailscale app (which I have to explain because most non-techies do not know what a VPN is). Tailscale requires its own account, so they have to first sign up to that, and I have to add them as an external user first.

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