Because this is the selfhosted community, not the FOSS community. There is some overlap, but they are different. There are many reasons to not use Plex, it not being free and open source are not among them.

It’s self hosting as long as you are in control of the data you’re hosting.

Nginx Proxy Manager is probably your best bet at this stage. It’s a simple to use GUI with QOL features like automatic certificate acquisition built on top of the industry standard Nginx. It should do everything you need it to do and it’s hands down the easiest to get started with.

When you reach the point that you’re trying to do something outside the scope of Nginx Proxy Manager’s gui, that would be a good time to get into another solution that’s config file based. My weapon of choice here is Caddy. I LOVE how simple and minimal the configuration is and it does a lot of things by default that other solutions don’t.

Plain Nginx is a solid tool but working with it directly will be the least straightforward and beginner friendly of all the solutions. Only reason I’d recommend straight Nginx is if you want experience with it for work.

Traefik, don’t bother with until you have an actual reason to use it over other solutions (Like you’re getting into clustering or kubernetes or anything else that requires dynamic configuration instead of static.)

It’s JBOD with parity, yeah.

UnRAID doesn’t use RAID. So your storage array can expanded at any time by adding drives and those drives can be any size.

What is your goal, simplest to configure? industry standard? Secure options set by default? Do you need a gui or are you fine with config files?

but you can use CF as a reverse proxy via Cloudflared to deliver video so long as you aren’t on the CDN

I think this is a common misinterpretation, but based on the limits of free tier CDN. It explains that in order to use the CDN for serving video, you have to use their back end for the video storage, but it doesn’t say that you can stream through their nodes all you want as long as you’re not using their CDN. People have been pressing them for clarification on this but they refuse to comment on it.

Currently the only method to fully adhere to their terms of service is to use their CDN and to do so via the methods laid out here:

Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN.

You are free to gamble on them not enforcing restrictions on your account however. I only bring this up because many of us have just opted to not use Cloudflare for this.

It should be noted that you’re not permitted to stream video through Cloudflare unless you use their CDN.

It’s a web management system for the entire system, including docker containers. So less like Portainer and more like Cockpit with something like Portainer built in. Unlike Portainer the container management is also based around an application marketplace for “one click” deployments with opinionated more-secure defaults. So once installed you’re sort of hiding the regular Linux OS underneath a more beginner friendly appearance of an OS with some guard rails.

I wouldn’t really recommend UnRAID outside of it being a NAS. The App Store functionality is very active and nice but most things aren’t really one click. I love my bare metal UnRAID box but there are better options for your cloud servers.

Is this the Vim of financial accounting?

You don’t need a VPN to trick Plex. Exposing the web ui to the world will likely show traffic coming from your router, which is internal.

This is not the case at all. That’s not how routing, nor port forwarding works. This will work on Jellyfin, but if you do it on Plex without paying, this will be blocked. You are still fundamentally misunderstanding how literally all of this works. And it’s getting to the point where I’m wondering if you’re actually this confidently ignorant, or if you’re just a troll, given the only comments on your account are pro-Plex and anti-Jellyfin.

Jellyfin is also very limiting based on your users devices. There is no Jellyfin app for Samsung TVs (without sideloading) or Playstation. Users there are shit out of luck.

Users there would be shit out of luck with Plex too, because neither of those platforms support Tailscale or any other VPN. More clients support Jellyfin than VPN apps, so if you’re not paying for Plex, then Jellyfin is less limiting than Plex.

The thing you’re failing to grasp is that Jellyfin is not nearly as simple as you’re making it out to be.

What you’ve failed to grasp is that Jellyfin is exactly as simple as I’ve made it out to be. You can forward a port, give your client an address to pop in, and remote streaming will work flawlessly, for free. You cannot do that same process with Plex for free. Only if you pay for it.

You’re saying two completely different incompatible things. In your last comment you said “You can just forward a port”. You can’t “just forward a port” or do any of the other things you suggested with Plex for free. Period.

The second thing you’re saying is using a VPN to trick Plex into thinking you’re local. You may be able to do that, but that’s entirely different from “just forwarding a port” or using a reverse proxy, or any of the other normal, easy ways to remotely stream over Jellyfin. It’s not only more work than sharing Jellyfin, but it’s also very limiting based on your users devices. For example, many people are streaming Plex, Emby, Jellyfin on RokuTVs. RokuTVs have an app for Jellyfin that can just connect directly, but it does not have a Tailscale client. So if you want to trick Plex into thinking they’re local, you’d now have to pay money to get them a new device, and then you’d have the configure the VPN on it, and troubleshoot that when it breaks. A lot of people are going to just opt for Jellyfin which is much easier and doesn’t require buying new hardware.

The point that you are entirely failing to grasp is that unless you want to pay up for Plex streaming, it is much simpler, with less limitations, to just switch to Jellyfin for remote streaming.

You can if you don’t pay.

No, you can’t.

The only thing they’re blocking is traffic through their servers. If you expose the port to your local instance, they have no control over it.

Once again, this is wrong. They do have control over it, and they are blocking traffic to your server even if you don’t go through theirs, unless you pay.

You cannot do what you’re suggesting if you don’t pay, on Plex. You can only do it for free with Jellyfin.

You can still just forward a port. Just expose the web ui port to the world, the same way Jellyfin does.

You can if you pay. If you aren’t paying, you can not remotely stream this way using Plex. I’m not sure what about this is so difficult for you to understand.

Ok so before when you said:

The work required to expose Jellyfin to the world is the same work to expose Plex.

What you actually meant was the work required to expose Jellyfin to the world is entirely different from the work you have to do to now expose Plex without paying. And the simplest solution of forwarding a port will no longer work for free, and anyone you share it with now also has to connect their device to Tailscale (if they even can on their device) even if they’re non-technical? And to be frank I’m not even sure doing all that will even work.

Where as with Jellyfin you can remotely stream without having to do ANY of that, for free…

Are you starting to understand why this might make people just switch to Jellyfin?

You’ve misunderstood Plex’s announcement.

This change to Plex just charges for the relay servers, you can still do free remote streaming in the same way Jellyfin does.

This is not correct. The change to Plex affects all remote streaming, regardless of whether you’re using the relay or direct streaming.

To be clear,

• You have configured Plex for remote streaming without a relay - You will need to pay for Plex Pass or the Watch Pass
• You have configured Jellyfin for remote streaming the same way as you would with Plex - Free.

You can forward a port in your router like you would with Plex, or you can use a reverse proxy, or Tailscale Funnel if you want to get jazzy wit it.

Then all you do on the client side is pop in the address.

Jellyfin absolutely does provide free remote streaming. Plex use to, but no longer will. That is why it’s a change making people switch.

• CasaOS
• CosmosOS
• Umbrel

I believe all of these are actually just running Debian as the actual OS underneath, but they give you a webui that makes deploying apps easier.

Of these three, I like the look of Cosmos the most. Seems to be security focused and comes with a reverse proxy and a built in SSO solutions. That’s something that’s usually a pain in the ass to set up yourself.

There’s technically that stupid ass LTT OS but I’m purposely leaving that one out.