Mildly Infuriating

Plex and Jellyfin are two ways to host your own content. Basically, instead of streaming from a Netflix server, you’re streaming from your own server.

Plex was the original, and Jellyfin is the FOSS alternative. In short, you run the program on a computer somewhere, and tell that program where all of your media is stored. It’ll scan your media depending on the library type (movies, TV shows, music, etc,) automatically pair it with the appropriate metadata, and make it available for streaming via the computer.

You can combine this with the *arr suite (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) to have your torrent client automatically download new content as it comes out. Basically, the appropriate *arr program listens for when new content gets released, then automatically tells your torrent client to search for that content (based on specific rules like language, bitrate, capture method, etc) and download it automatically. This pairs nicely with Plex/Jellyfin because you can use automatic torrent management to drop the files directly into the right folders for your server to scan and make available.

It does have a few drawbacks. One of the most annoying is port forwarding. Lots of VPNs have stopped offering port forwarding, because some creeps figured out how to use it to share/trade CSAM anonymously. But Plex and Jellyfin require an open port in order to be made available outside of your network, and you don’t want to run the server+torrents without a VPN. Some VPNs allow port forwarding, but randomly assign the port every time you connect. So it may work fine for a while, but will require occasional attention when that port changes.

There’s also the issue with needing a computer that’s turned on all the time. Some people (like myself) just run it on their home desktop. But that means I needed to set up Wake On LAN to be able to boot my computer up remotely, or just be okay with letting it idle all the time and never sleep. Personally, I chose to enable WOL, so I just remote into my network and send a magic packet before trying to stream. But that’s an extra step some people won’t want to do every time. If you have an old computer sitting around gathering dust, it can be a great weekend project.