They don't provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.

specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home.

Why would Plex need to do that? I can access my Jellyfin and outside of my home just fine without someone else acting as a middle man.

I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.

I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don't have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.

Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video

From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I've had no issues. I am the only user of my network.

My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that's for privacy not remote access.

I access it via NPM the same as I access most of the rest of my services. As far as I've been able to tell, unauthenticated viewing can happen on Jellyfin, but the person trying to access it will need to know the path that Jellyfin uses to access the media. If you already know my internal file paths, you can watch it from my server I suppose.

I quit using Plex for my own enjoyment a year or two ago when my work decided to block Plex.tv, I can still reach my personal server as it's accessible to the internet, but I cannot login as that requires being able to access Plex's authentication servers. At least with Jellyfin I can use my own Authentik instance for auth.

If it's just you using it setting up VPN is an easy solution. I just use wireguard. If you have a pic you can run pivpn which is just wireguard.

Most of the plex enshitification can also just be turned off in the settings. I've got all the ad stuff and suggestions off and its just the core plex experience left.

I use Zerotier, free tier, fairly easy to set up.

I use NetBird and have zero issues.

10TB. 80% full. I have 2TB that I can add if I need. At this point I've maintained 80% for about 1 year.

40TB, but that’s way more than I would realistically need if I was better about deleting old content. I have shows saved that I haven’t watched in years. With the *arr stack, there is very little reason to keep a lot of media saved, because reacquiring it again in the future is dead simple.

I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it's shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it's insane.

I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don't bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don't really care. Looks like I've got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.

If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don't think it's currently worth it at today's prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.

2TB, but I'm also new to this. I am literally running ffmpeg on some of the shows to compress them a little or dropping unnecessary audio streams

8 GB

1TB HDD, 80% full :') Although I'm using a laptop as a server, so my options are a little limited

4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I've only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I've got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.

75TB

3 x 16Tb Seagate disks. One is for parity. So around 29Tb of space. Got them used about 2 years ago.

6 x 4 TB HDDs, got them used for $40 each

I would only ever buy new HDDs tbh. But also, I bought a stack of 8TB HDDs in 2023 for €180 a piece and those same models are now €300... Thanks, Obama.

Anyway, I have 4 of those, 1 is parity, so 24TB of actual space. I started with a 2TB collection from my laptop harddrive and I'm now at 7TB used. I used to be more cautious with my space and I still have my *arrs set to stingy profiles now, to make downloads faster, but I also download and keep a lot more.

I do sometimes go through and delete stuff that I won't watch (either watched and didn't like or never watched). But that's more so I won't get tempted to watch it than for the space currently.

There's Feishin that can connect to Jellyfin or Navidrome, on Android I use Symfonium

If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it's UI is significantly better than stable.

mpd server. Although mainly, so I can use the beautifully named ncmpdcpp client

FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.

I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.

Does Volumio suit your needs? I haven't used Plex audio to compare

I've been considering audiomuse, but I have old equipment available.

My options are my media server, which is an old Xeon E3-1275v3 with 32G of RAM, which also hosts Navidrome, my arr stack and the associated downloaders, or my Home Assistant and Jellyfin box, which is a Lenovo M700 Tiny which is an i5 6600T but has only 8G of ram.

Or, an 8G Pi5 with an SSD (using the pi SSD hat)

I'm not sure either of those 3 options would handle audiomuse AI all that well....

JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex

Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N's is maddening.

Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle... wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.

Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it's one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.

I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let's me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.

I'm big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.

JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.