What’s the “that” that you’d have to do anyway with Plex? I had to do nothing of the sort. I asky friends and family to make a Plex account and ask what email address they used. Then I give that email access to my library

Couldn’t upvote this harder. Tried Jellyfin for 5 mins and was super confused why I couldn’t find sharing options. After googling and reading about reverse proxies and buying domains and shit I said fuck it and uninstalled

This is exactly my strategy. My Lifetime Plex Pass paid for itself years ago. As soon as Jellyfin makes it easy to share my library with friends and family, I’ll move

Does data take up less room when it’s being used by AI?

Big if true. Can you point to documentation about Sponsorblock in yt-dlp?

My one and only Pi is exclusively for piracy. Qbittorrent, VPN, Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr. My NAS does everything else. If my Pi died spontaneously, it’d be annoying but not devastating. I’ve been thinking about cloning the SD card so if/when it dies, I can just plug in a new one.

If your Synology NAS is in Raid, up-sizing your drives is dead simple.

Pop out one of your current, smaller drives. Pop in a new, bigger drive. Wait for Disk Station to migrate data over to the new drive (note that this can literally take days depending how much data there is). Then do the same with the next old, small drive and the next one until all old, small drives are replaced with new, big ones.

This will work as long as your current drives are not like 24 TB or whatever the upper limit is these days. In that case, you need more bays.

After this is done, move all the data from your externals onto your Synology NAS.

For what it’s worth, they’re dropping the branded drive requirement https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/synology-caves-walks-back-some-drive-restrictions-on-upcoming-nas-models/

Are there any security concerns that this is a Chinese company?

Does it do RAID?

I’m in a similar situation with my 218+ so I’m interested to hear some answers. It’s still running great though so I don’t need to replace it soon but I like planning ahead

Can you explain to my mom how to install tailscale on her Roku and that she has to turn it on each time she wants to use Jellyfin but then back off again when she wants to watch something on a different app?

Conversely, letting friends use your Jellyfin is complicated.

The networking aspect is basically the only thing stopping me from switching from Plex to Jellyfin. I got Jellyfin running and accessing my server myself, while on my home network is easy. However, when it comes to accessing outside of my network, it gets complicated, and when it comes to other people accessing my server it gets more complicated, and then accessing my own server and friends’ servers it gets even more complicated.

With Plex, all of that is super easy. I can watch stuff from my own server and my friends’ servers on any device, including a web browser, and I can tell my mom, for example, “install Plex on your Roku and tell me what email address you use to log in” and boom, she has access to my library.

I don’t even know what a reverse proxy is

I make the account for them. Then I log in as them and set it up so they only see my server. Then I send them the credentials and have them login

Does it work on a smart tv or roku or whatever?

Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does.

I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.

Dude how the hell am I supposed to walk my mom through setting up tailscale on her Roku?

And what if you have multiple friends all sharing each others libraries?

This is not a feasible solution let alone a “very easy” one.

But why can I “just install a program” on my windows machine or on my phone and it is that easy?