Why not just host the stack at home and VPN in? Jellyfin is pretty snappy I don’t think you’ll struggle much network wise.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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That is plan A, I have had buffering issues doing this at various hotels though. This is more of a plan b setup. That probably wasn't clear.
Love your edit. Sounds like me, lol.
What are you planning on playing it on? Hotel TVs are often locked to their cable boxes, or have the TVs in frames. I'd probably just use a laptop.
Or do vacation things. I can watch TV at home.
Usually they just disable all the hdmi ports except for cable and don't bother to lock the final hdmi port to a specific device. So long as you have a long hdmi cable and nimble hands, it's not too much effort to just pull out the cable hdmi and put in your own.
If you can reach it. I've seen hotel TVs mounted in furniture that prevented access without tools.
I'll be taking an android tv box with me, so the tv lockdown is a concern. I'll be taking my laptop w me in case I need it. I considered just installing jellyfin on that too.
i understand the 'do vacation things', i like to watch tv while i fall asleep, so there's that.
Some good things to think about here.
What, exactly, is your end goal? To have a way to play movies that you're bringing with you on the hotel TV?
Edit: I only all because this seems like a hell of a lot of work just to play movies while you're traveling, when you could just play them with VLC directly.
Or, if you really want to steam movies to your phone, put VLC on your phone, run minidlna on the computer, and plug it into a GL-iNet Slate Plus.
But if you're really, like, going to some big get-together and are responsible for media entertainment for a crowd of 20 in a rental, then yeah, taking Jellyfin makes sense. But the hardware doesn't, unless you make damned sure there's nothing that'll need transcoding. One movie, most CPU/GPUs can manage, but if several people are transcoding multiple movies at the same time, it'll be a fairly beefie machine.
VLC is an option I hadn't considered, I'd still have to get the media on the hdd, but something to consider for sure. I won't be hosting any showings, this is just for personal viewing.
Yeah, then definitely just install VLC. Far easier than mucking about with Jellyfin.
That's fair. I'm already very familiar with jellyfin, so the setup wasn't much concern, but the other options provided are good.
I agree to just fill up the HDD with media and bring that to play with VLC. Setting up the *arrs and usenet seems like a lot.
Like someone else suggested, maybe just bring a laptop and then you can manually torrent the few new episodes of whatever show you're currently watching rather than dealing with the automation aspect.
Yes, mostly just to have stuff to watch without commercials.
Are you aware of findroid? It's an android app that also lets you download the series and watch it in offline mode like other streaming services. Maybe this is an option.
Yes, I've used it in the past to download some stuff offline for airplanes, but I think that would be more cumbersome to download that way than automate it using sonarr/radarr, (unless this has gotten better in the past year or so). I'm expecting to have quite a bit of media on the nas since it'll be for an entire month.
You're gonna be on an aeroplane for a month?
e: tongue in cheek and all aren't SD cards are a thing these days? You've got the obvious network solutions but if you're off the grid?
Why bother?
I download all my content to my laptop/phone and then just run a server from there, either using jellyfin, vlc, or casting software to my firestick.
But since it's a month long, it's a decent amount of content. I mean, you're already planning on buying ram so you could spin up a virtual server for like 15 bucks or less and just use that for a month.
Also since you're bringing this pc, it doesn't have to be crazy. I'd just use Windows or any OS you have and serve my content on the network using Jellyfin or VLC. Since it's jellyfin you can use their clients and avoid transcending, and should be set on a mini pc.
Do you even need to run the server locally? I’m still working on transitioning to Jellyfin but Plex would let you download media to watch offline. Just natively in the app, no need to install the server on the vacation device.
Good point. I have used the Fladder app to download content!
I had considered that as well. I'm just thinking out loud.