I run a full media server, as well do a few friends. Now we had the idea to share our media libraries. In a first quick attempt we, mounted each other’s library folder via an smb share and imported those in jellyfin (all servers connected by VPN) Works quite well, but is kind of cumbersome the more people get in. I had the following idea: distributed storage, not as in redundancy, but more like mergerfs. Each “node” allocates a certain amount of storage, say node A, B and C provide 1TB each, these get fused into a singe mount that shows up as 3TB volume. If one node goes offline, the volume will only be 2TB and all files on the offline node will of course be unavailable.
Did a bit of research and found stuff like ceph,.glusterfs or seeweedfs, all of which I guess have a lot more functionality and thus are quite complicated and a little over my head. Do you do something like that or have any good ideas how to do that easily?
You have to pay for Plex to access features you just have on Jellyfin. Like being able to stream to a mobile device.
I don’t know how so many people seem to have issues with it when its always been as easy as installing it directly on my computer and booting up the web interface, or now running it in Docker with a simple compose file.
There are alternatives for most features people think are missing. There are several apps that work on mobile if you want to stream music and alternate clients for video playback as well.