I started to follow a guide (& doing a bunch of googling + chatGPT) for setting Jellyfin remote access for my parents. And this is where I’m a bit out of my depth […] I have a dynamic IP […] duckDNS path

Stay away from DuckDNS. Used to be fabulous but now it’s incredibly overused and very unstable. Works, then just stops for a period of time. Check out HurricaneElectric. Any A record can be enabled as DDNS that you can update with just curl. It’s great. I’ve been using them for about 10 years now without issues. They were down one time like… 5 years ago for several hours, and that was it.

Also as a side note: I see people talk about Caddy as a reverse proxy for extra security, but what does it do?

This option is nice if you self-host a web server with no bandwidth restriction. You setup caddy, update your DNS to register your home IP on X domain. Point jelly.x.domain to whatever your public IP is, with the port as a reverse proxy, then your IP is reachable via jelly.x.domain but it’s not a great setup for you because of the dynamic IP unless you do a bunch of setup to ensure it routes.

IMO the best option would be;

1. Install jellyfin server
2. Open port 8096 on your router for your jellyfin server IP
3. Create a jellyfin user for your parents, and enable remote connection
4. Setup DDNS (I highly suggest he.net) and point your domain to your IP
5. Setup cron job to update your DDNS record with he.net every hour or so
6. Setup jellyfin for your parents TV or whatever device they’ll use to watch it
7. Login and enjoy