Any Jellyfin sharing groups on TE ?

Vishnu2jd

Vishnu2jd

Contributor
I'm not sure if this is allowed here, but I was wondering about sharing Jellyfin instances, similar to Netflix account sharing.
This is more like an experiment. As this wouldn't work like typical OTT account sharing. If account login details were shared, we would need to log into each account on a different domain and search for movies, which isn't practical.


What I'm thinking is giving read-only access to media folders so others can mount them in their own Jellyfin instances. This way, there's no need to log into different accounts/domains. There are many ways to do this: WireGuard connections between users, Tailscale, or combined VPS rental. It's like federated jellyfin.

Are there any other methods?

Here are some pros and cons of the methods I've considered:
  • WireGuard: Extremely difficult setup, can be challenging or impossible if behind CGNAT. Need to have (n*(n-1)/2) connections and configurations etc which is impossible .
  • Tailscale: Best for this case (possibly). However, it requires sharing login credentials for one of these accounts: Microsoft, Google, GitHub (easiest and lowest risk), or Apple ID. Fake accounts can be created and used for this.
  • VPS rental: Also difficult to set up(but much easier than direct wiregaurd) and requires monthly payments and server maintenance.

I know this is hard to setup and not as easy as account sharing. Anyone interested in experimenting this?
 
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If you have a tplink router, you can setup a remote access tunnel on a custom domain (one free given by tplink), it's the easiest one I guess to configure.
 
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In regards to two of your options:

Tailscale:
You don't need to share login credentials.
- Everyone can have their own accounts and machines can be shared between each other's tailnets like this: Link
- You can also invite other users to your own tailnet (upto 3 users for free): Link
Also, keep in mind, if two devices on different networks are both behind CGNAT, then your traffic will pass through a relay server, and that has very limited bandwidth (not a good experience for playing videos).
But if just one is behind CGNAT, then UDP hole punching will make a direct connection.

VPS:
- Oracle Cloud provides a generous permanent free tier without adding any payment options.
Not sure about the payment option thing (back in 2020 they didn't require it, and I haven't been asked for it since either), but the free tier is still up and running.
 
Easily doable with smb shares over wg tunnels but the latency will hurt throughput and you may not have a good experience. What we really need is federation in jellyfin but that's not happening anytime soon. I think webdav mounts will be safer than wg tunnels and will likely perform better as well
 
kage said:
- Everyone can have their own accounts and machines can be shared between each other's tailnets like this: Link
- You can also invite other users to your own tailnet (upto 3 users for free): Link
Click to expand...
But adding , say 50 other servers, manually each one is not practical.

kage said:
Also, keep in mind, if two devices on different networks are both behind CGNAT, then your traffic will pass through a relay server, and that has very limited bandwidth (not a good experience for playing videos).
But if just one is behind CGNAT, then UDP hole punching will make a direct connection.
Click to expand...
Also keeping this in mind, I came up this idea:
We could use a single VPS as both our own custom DERP relay server (replacing Tailscale's default relays which are slow) and as a central coordination point.
The setup would be:
1. 99 maximum home servers (i.e, Jellyfin media) + 1 VPS = 100 devices total. We need to use single shared tailscale account as it is so much easier.
2. The VPS acts as both custom relay server instead of tailscale's relay and central media directory
3. Each user would:
- Login to Tailscale on their server
- Share their Jellyfin media folder to the VPS with read-only permission (NFS is ideal here?)
- Mount the VPS's shared directory in their Jellyfin instance
- This would , ideally, adds all existing users folders into new user's instance with single click. And when others new users are added , existing user's media should be updated.
- Tailscale would try to have direct connection if possible. If not , it will use that vps are relay.

We'd need some standardized folder naming and some scripts, but this would be vastly simpler than managing a fully meshed network between all participants.

I think this would be difficult but achievable?
 
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Vishnu2jd said:
But adding , say 50 other servers, manually each one is not practical.


Also keeping this in mind, I came up this idea:
We could use a single VPS as both our own custom DERP relay server (replacing Tailscale's default relays which are slow) and as a central coordination point.
The setup would be:
1. 99 maximum home servers (i.e, Jellyfin media) + 1 VPS = 100 devices total. We need to use single shared tailscale account as it is so much easier.
2. The VPS acts as both custom relay server instead of tailscale's relay and central media directory
3. Each user would:
- Login to Tailscale on their server
- Share their Jellyfin media folder to the VPS with read-only permission (NFS is ideal here?)
- Mount the VPS's shared directory in their Jellyfin instance
- This would , ideally, adds all existing users folders into new user's instance with single click. And when others new users are added , existing user's media should be updated.
- Tailscale would try to have direct connection if possible. If not , it will use that vps are relay.

We'd need some standardized folder naming and some scripts, but this would be vastly simpler than managing a fully meshed network between all participants.

I think this would be difficult but achievable?
Click to expand...
Yup, it's doable.
With custom DERP servers you won't be able to do cross-tailnet actions, so all machines would have to be under the same account anyway.
If you're using the VPS as a DERP server, I don't think it'd count in your list of machines. You should have all 100 available.
 
kage said:
If you're using the VPS as a DERP server, I don't think it'd count in your list of machines. You should have all 100 available.
Click to expand...
But VPS should also act as central directory. It stores all the details about other servers. Users should be only talking to that VPS and vps does all the stuff in the back. So it should also be added as a device , 1 in 100?
If VPS is to only act as relay server, users need to add each others directories manually , i.e add to add 99 others in 100 group
 
I use oracle vm. It has enough free bandwidth for my needs.

With plex you wont need any thing. Just machine capable of transcoding like anything above intel 10th gen would be fine. Or gpu. For direct play to mutiple devices tailscale is fine.
 
Vishnu2jd said:
But VPS should also act as central directory. It stores all the details about other servers. Users should be only talking to that VPS and vps does all the stuff in the back. So it should also be added as a device , 1 in 100?
If VPS is to only act as relay server, users need to add each others directories manually , i.e add to add 99 others in 100 group
Click to expand...
Ah I see what you mean.
It should be doable, although I haven't done anything like this before so not sure how trivial or complicated it'll be.
But yeah, if this is the topology, then the VPS would need to be 1/100.

Do post an update when you get around to this.
Would be interesting to read about how it was approached!
 
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