After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
That doesn’t slove the problem if your Smart TV doesn’t support tailscale or something like Wireguard. Using another machine connected to a VPN like for example Tailscale/Headscale and then using ssh portforwarding allows you to access the service(jellyfin) on the device without support.
It would be like this:
Jellyfin <-- Tailscale/Headscale <— Machine forwarding the jellyfins port <-- Smart TV
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
There are a ton of reverse proxy options that manage the cert for you
There’s lots of reasons I don’t want to set this up
If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
My mom lives 900 miles away and she can barely turn a computer on
What in the goddamn fuck, sir
Step 1) Install tailscale (headscale also exists if you wanna fully self-host it)
Step 2) Done, solved
That doesn’t slove the problem if your Smart TV doesn’t support tailscale or something like Wireguard. Using another machine connected to a VPN like for example Tailscale/Headscale and then using ssh portforwarding allows you to access the service(jellyfin) on the device without support.
It would be like this:
Jellyfin <-- Tailscale/Headscale <— Machine forwarding the jellyfins port <-- Smart TV
This can be done with a command like this:
ssh -L 0.0.0.0:8096:jellyfin_tailnet_ip:8096 -f -N user@machine
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
How do you go about doing that?
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on