Yeah, that’s a potential solution, but then my sister’s starting college soon so she’d need to VPN into one of the networks when she’s not at home; which brings us back to square one.
Then there’s whenever they’re not home and want to watch something on their phone or laptop.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don’t need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They’re an Apple user and I’m aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it’s the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
Similarly, I have a Plex lifetime license.
I think my biggest hurdle for Jellyfin is setting up a VPS for all my self hosted services. Currently I use Cloudflare Tunnels, which is easy but I’d like to get away from it because Cloudflare and it doesn’t allow for streaming services to run on it.
I’ll spin up Jellyfin and see how Swiftfin is on the Apple TV. If I feel it has minimal friction I’ll try and make the jump.
With regards to spreading the good word of self hosting, I’ve had the best luck just offering good services to those around me. Spliit, HomeAssistant, and Immich have been easy to get my partner to use. Then I just happen to say “oh yeah, this is running on my server btw”. The holy grail would be to convince my friends to use Fluxer or something instead of Discord.