I can't recommend Jellyfin enough. It works remarkably well!

https://jellyfin.org

Jellyfin is an amazing and underappreciated project. I've run it for a year or so and it's great.

I use (and recommend) the Kodi addon as the client. I had stability issues with the jellyfin Android (TV) app, but Kodi runs on all sorts of platforms and it's very well supported. I use it for music, too (there's a dedicated music player for it in f-droid called "gelli.")

What's the difference between this and Plex?

Jellyfin is free and open source software for one. I don't know the exact difference in the feature set but I have heard people complaining that Plex is focusing more on surveiling it's users to push ads. I just got Jellyfin working with linuxserver.io docker image on my rpi4 and it is pretty nice.

Adding a random Jellyfin anecdote: Jellyfin stable (10.6.2) is buggy and somewhat unusable for me — videos wouldn't play because of some browser compatibility issue.

This seems to have been fixed in the 10.7.0 RCs, and they've been quite wonderful.

The only feature I find lacking is being able to use Jellyfin on a Chromecast, via their iOS app. It seems to be blocked by the lack of upstream SDK support: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-expo/issues/16

You have to pay for hardware transcoding with plex. Plex (and also Emby for that matter) have more client apps and platforms supported than Jellyfin though, so you might want to check that before settling for one.

Jellyfin is fully open-source and doesn't require any third party authentication. It's not quite feature complete versus Plex but it is very close, and has never been a issue for me or my users.

I don't do it because I don't want to expose my network, but /r/plex would have more info.

You could always set up a VPN and make the Plex server only available on the VPN's interface. But then you have to be on the VPN on whatever device you want to watch on, so it can be a bit of a hassle if you're not on your own devices.

That's not the way to do it. If anyone can break out of Plex they are on your local network.

Besides, if you're going through all that networking hassle, you're better off doing things right. Get a real firewall like pfSense, then setup a separate network just for outside facing services. To access those services locally create firewall rules that allow traffic 1 way: from your trusted network to your outside facing network. While you're at it, consider making separate networks for IoT devices, and maybe even another for untrusted guest devices. You can use VLANs or physical interfaces if your firewall has enough ports.

Seems like running separate wires for each of those networks would be a huge pain.

Nah, with VLAN tagging you can do it as a single legged router, or as a virtual switch if you’re running it all in a hypervisor.

My home network has 12 VLANs, but each VM cluster node only has 2 NICs