Selfhosted

honestly every explanation probably just ends at 'this is what i learned on and it works'. same way i religiously use nano and try to do everything in bash first. or how a couple coworkers can't stop explaining their vim workflow and defending python unprompted like it's a trauma response for them. my current homelab is also running a r9 with 64gb ram and 30tb storage. if i were paying for remote hosting, still using salvaged hardware or being paid, i'd invest time learning newer processes. but containers haven't caught my interested and this set up takes basically no effort on my part to maintain, so i can focus my limited free time elsewhere.

I've been using jelly since just after the emby fork and never had an update issue on docker. Automatic snapshots every 5 mins (amoung other backup tools). means I don't need to worry much if it does.

To be fair there is a tvOS app in development but progress is slow because the whole project is maintained by a small handful of volunteers. They’ve put out a call for help and the maintainers post updates here

I’ve heard jellyfin has a lot of security issues

The biggest known stuff I saw on their GitHub is that a number of the exposed service URLs under the hood don't require auth. So, it's open-source with known requirements, you can tell easily from the outside that it's running, and you can cause it to activate a LOT of packages without logging in. That's a zero-day in any package that can be passed a payload away from disaster.

AS far as TVOS, I'm kinda surprised swiftfin doesn't service you.

https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin is available for tvOS. works great for me with one bug. since i have homepods connected to one of my apple tv's as it's speakers. i had to change the setting to use the native video player instead of vlc to avoid and audio delay bug. that cost me the auto play next episode function. i though not auto playing the next episode would annoy me, but it's turned out to not be a issue at all. but infuse doesn't include that bug if you want both homepod tv speakers and auto play next episode with jellyfin. as for security, since jellyfin is more modifiable it has a lot more room for misconfiguration for sure. plex had plenty of it's own security issues, we just only heard about them when some security blogger discovered it.

Op already said they were behind authentik

There also absolutely are apps for tv oses like Android, I use one daily.

I am also not up to date on Jellyfin security issues but the biggest one I care about is that its clients don’t support OIDC. There’s a neat plugin for OIDC, but without client support it only works with the web client and I’m not a fan of leaving login pages open to the internet.

Anything that has a remote interface is garbage. It's all cursor mouse based except on a few devices.

It's not as good as Plex by a long shot. If you have Plex pass no brainer. If not, I'd personally just buy the pass. On Xbox it was just unusable.

Honestly, the easiest thing to do is put it on a mesh VPN like Tailscale and connect their streaming device to your tailnet. If they’re non technical parents then if their TV OS doesn’t support Tailscale, you can pick up a Walmart brand ONN streaming box for <$50 which supports for Tailscale and Jellyfin.

not OP, but this has reared its ugly face once or twice with my friends.

i have been running into another issue, though it may be a firefox issue: playing some filetypes fail to play on web browser but work fine on jellyfin app (i believe my settings are correct for hardware decode on server where it can)

i still have to put some time into figuring it out tho (havent really done my research yet)

i ended up doing both. ldap for the apps. oidc for web based users and the apps that support the quick connect feature. the local user account system works fine too, and ldap would be enough. i just wanted an excuse to play round with sso systems, and it was fun figuring out how to connect all my servers.

authenik has a good docs site for both it's docker container and connecting it to jellyfin. Authelia looked interesting too.

I saw this and was pleased, actually. The relative opacity of containers makes them a validation challenge and hides versioning from standard tooling used for large host populations and/or enterprise.

Even if they sparkle.

it's just what i'm comfortable with. started playing with linux servers before docker existed. i've got frigate and authentik running in docker, but if i have the option to run something outside docker i still prefer that.