This thread is comparing the ease of setup between Plex and Jellyfin and having to purchase your own domain and set a bunch of stuff up on your own definitely doesn’t make for an easier install. You might be right about people’s ability to type in a URL, but this definitely illustrates the added difficulty in setting up Jellyfin.
There are a lot of people here who simply cannot be bothered to figure out remote access
I think being apprehensive is natural when you’re entirely left on your own for security, knowing that you could leave yourself vulnerable if you do it incorrectly. Add to this the fact that half the info you’ll find on the process is people claiming you just need to open some ports, which you know to be wrong, and it’s easy to see why it’s hard to trust any advice you find.
I don’t have a ton of experience with other cases but I have been blown away by the quality and customizability of the Define 6. It’s super solid with good hardware and the ability to convert it around to different formats. You will need to purchase extra drive caddies as mine only came with 4 I think but I’ve bought extras over the years to the point that I have an extra set that I didn’t realize I had. The whole front is drive space from floor to ceiling and It has two mounts in the back for 2.5" drives along with two in the front that can be used to mount a GPU vertically or for two additional 2.5" drives. You will need to buy two extra 2.5 mounts to use all four spots though. Apart from that it’s silent like I mentioned with foam in the top panel to deaden noise. It also has removable screens in the base and front for the air intake to make it easy to clean the dust out. Both side panels are removable with lots of cable management built in and a built-in fan hub.
I’m not super familiar with the 7th gen Define and it’s XL counterpart so you may do some research to ensure it has the same capacity if these are all you can find now. The Define 6 is only slightly larger than my old Antec midtower case.
Depending on your future storage needs, you might check out Fractal’s Define series of cases. I have the Define 6 and have room for around 12 3.5" drives + 4 2.5" drives in a midtower format. It’s super silent too with four fans and the nine 3.5" drives I had in it previously (consolidated down to six larger capacity drives now).
Also MergerFS like mentioned above, SnapRAID, OMV, Unraid, TrueNAS, or just plain ZFS. Something to create a pool of drives will be your best bet. These all do it while some are full OSes or hypervisors and others are things you can implement in your current OS. What are you currently using for your OS?
AFAIK no you can’t use different sized drives. I have read about the update to allow you to expand existing pools but it hasn’t made its way to the version of ZFS that Proxmox uses, but I hope it does soon.
Previously, I was using SnapRAID which does allow you to use any size drive provided your parity drives are equal or larger to the rest of the drives in the pool so you may check that out. It worked well for me on Windows, is available on Linux, and makes it very easy to expand the pool.
I would caution that if you plan to build a big library over time, to just bite the bullet and get matching drives to start with because I tried mismatched drives purchased over several years (whatever was a good deal when I needed to expand the pool) and it got to the point where it was becoming unmanageable once I hit about 8 drives as SATA ports became limited and HDD capacities on the market increased (why waste a port on a 6TB drive when you could have a 14TB-20TB drive instead?). With this new server build, I just bought several matching 14TB drives from serverpartdeals.com and had to transfer everything from the old SnapRAID pool to my ZFS pool which took about a week with rsync.
You might look at TechHuts previous tutorial on setting this all up from around a year ago where he instead used Cockpit to manage his ZFS pool shares rather than TrueNAS. I followed that one a few months ago with a minor amount of Linux experience and got everything set up on Proxmox quite easily. I do recall some people complaining about having issues with permissions or some such which is why he created this new tutorial, but I didn’t run into those issues for whatever reason.
This new Proxmox build has been rock solid after running everything on flaky laptops, mini PCs, and a Windows-based server build for the past 12+ years and I’ve also used it to now run things like Jellyseer, Immich, Frigate, and more which is awesome, but I did spend a good chunk of money for a lot of new hardware, redundant SSDs, RAM, etc so you may be better off starting with something more basic to tinker and learn with.
Yes this is how I have mine setup to do just like OP is wanting.
This reminds me to go leave a review on their refresh of the app. I just got off a plane and Plex wouldn’t load once I lost service for me or my wife to watch our downloaded media.
The DVD drive should have a SATA connector already.
OP you can do this, I 3D printed a couple adapters to fit 3.5" drives into my old server case’s 5.25" slots while migrating everything to a new server. My only real concern with the whole thing is that there’s no rubber isolators on them which could cause issues longterm.
I use it and it works great except their eddie client is kinda garbage (at least on Windows) so I switched to using Wiresock on Windows and then later gluetun after setting up a Linux machine.
Or Lemmy
How exactly are you aquiring a folder full of media without technical know how in the first place? (Genuine question?)
Because there are excellent setup guides out there that walk you through the process and allow you to set all this up without knowing anything about the individual steps you’re taking.
It’s not that expensive. You can buy a lifetime pass for like $70 when it goes on sale. That’s like half the price I pay to Comcast each month for my internet.
It was always a thing except with Android and iOS which had a separate one-time fee attached to enable remote playback.
The Plex Relay is enabled by default and is used anytime people can’t directly connect to your server like if your port forwarding is screwed up.
No it’s not the same as with Plex because they have their own security solution and authentication servers. With Jellyfin that’s completely on you to figure out and doing it wrong (exposing open ports to the open internet) can have terrible consequences.
I do agree that it’s not a huge deal to buy a lifetime Plex Pass as a server owner though. I’ve had my issues with Plex over the last decade but it’s a hell of a lot more polished than the competition and it’s extremely easy to share with all my friends and family who don’t know shit about computers or other tech related subjects.
I’m no expert but I was never able to connect to Plex if the host was running a VPN which caused me a ton of issues until I figured out split tunneling.
“Very easy” assuming you aren’t trying to share with non-technical people or your elderly parents.
In Proxmox, LXCs allow you to easily share resources between containers like your iGPU can be shared with your Jellyfin container and a separate Immich container. From my understanding, VMs bind whatever resource to the VM which can’t easily be used with other VMs or containers.