Comment on Apple TV's tvOS 17 brings VPN support, which Tailscale now supports.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 9 months agoUsually yes! There will be some minor overhead from both nodes keeping in touch with the Tailscale command server but mostly they talk to each other.
Read this though to see if there’s a case where direct connection might not be possible: tailscale.com/kb/1181/firewalls/
MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Man, that’s great news. Though I may have some extra set up to do because I tried once with a decent internet connection and couldn’t get plex working over tailscale.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 9 months ago
Plex has issues with VPNs unfortunately. It wants you to go through them whenever you connect to your server, and this means it needs to know where your server IP/domain is. But if you have situations where the IP/domain changes, like a VPN, it can get confused.
It’s one of the reasons that made me give up Plex back in the day. (Holding your accounts hostage was the other one.)
MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
oh wow, thanks for that insight. So jellyfin in this use case would be superior?
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 9 months ago
Jellyfin or Emby, yeah. But it’s more of an artificial limitation for Plex so it’s worth checking that they haven’t fixed it by any chance since the last time I tried.
The way these apps work is that the mobile app scans the local network for the server. That works when you’re connected on WiFi at home but typically not when you’re connecting over VPN, because a VPN isn’t usually configured with broadcast. So the app for all three (Plex/Jellyfin/Emby) will discover the server just fine on WiFi but choke on VPN. To work around this, the mobile app [should] allow you to also enter the server address manually. Plex used to have this too but removed it at some point, so now it only relies on autodetect. 🤷
So now the only way it can work on Plex is if you keep the same server address/name when you’re on WiFi and when you’re on VPN, let the app detect it once on WiFi, then it “just works” on VPN too… but that can be problematic if the address/name is different on VPN, which is 90% of cases.
Between Emby and Jellyfin it’s a toss-up, the main reason I’m using Jellyfin (I used to use Plex and Emby too) is because it’s 100% free. Emby switched essential features like transcoding behind paywall at some point, and Plex locked pretty much everything useful behind paid Plex pass and you have to login to their website every time, so you can’t use it if your external internet connection drops even if your local network is fine.
Here’s an in-depth comparison of all three: github.com/…/Compare-Media-Servers