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How is this different from Jellyfin?

Jellyfin can only be used from remote if you can expose its ports somehow. Lots of routers block that, or your ISP is set up such that you need NAT tricks, and have to use STUN and TURN and such to work around it. Jellyfin doesn't handle any of that. Tailscale helps here, but then if you want family members to use it, you have to set them up on tailscale as well. Or you set up a service on a VPS.

I wrote this because I'm unhappy with the offerings out there, including Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin. Also too many bugs that have been sitting for years with no solution. For Jellyfin in particular:

- SyncPlay is buggy, doesn't support voice, and seems to be unmaintained now.

- Way too many CVEs, mostly FFmpeg injections (CVE-2026-35033, CVE-2026-35032, CVE-2026-48793, CVE-2025-31499).

- The session key leaking in URLs.

- Upgrades breaking the database.

- Needless transcodes and wrong "can play this" guesses.

- Subtitles that load late or drift after resuming.

I use jellyfin remotely with tailscale. It was trivial to set up. There's probably a dozen other holepunching mesh VPN approaches that would also work. Not to mention Iroh is in the mix now too.

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