This lets you connect to and play another friend's Jellyfin rather nicely. I think it's also so the HTML and JS that forms the web interface can basically be the app as well.
> And it doesn't seem to want to accept any answer as to what the server URL is.
Should be "http://192.168.100.xxx:8096" - make sure your jellyfin isn't just set to listen on localhost only though.
They've sort of conflated three different ideas - one, the non-browser clients are separate and need a way to select multiple servers from a common wrapper app; two, for development purposes separate the server of the UI package from the backend being accessed; three, have a server based application.
None of these items are uncommon, they are just commonly solved by making the separate front-end server an exception rather than a weird and senseless default. Most people solve this by making the dev mode case an exception.
Moreover, why not just add a button to the UI to automatically connect to the _UI serving server_ instead of having the user type it?
I love jellyfin, but this stuff is just terrible design for out of box experience or connecting from a new client instance, and it breaks when you're traversing a network boundary with something like Tailscale.
$ podman run --rm -it -p 8096:8096/tcp jellyfin/jellyfin
That said, I might've found a clue: if you re-run it, you get another randomized hostname, and then you get the server select page. If I clear cookies and reload, it again skips the server select page. So it seems like if you have the hostname of your jellyfin instance change, say, by starting a new Docker container with a different name, but have it accessible at the same place, that might cause this weirdness.
Other issues may include improperly configured reverse proxies. (If you're using a reverse proxy, you should make sure it's configured right for Jellyfin's websockets and CORS usage and potentially some other stuff.)
I don't know what the answer is, but I ran into this when I was trying to harden my systemd settings. I'll link my override below and maybe someone can give something more conclusive (and any suggestions to my override or for other services are greatly welcomed. I'm happy to add even ones I don't use). Where I hit this error was when messing with RestrictAddressFamilies, which are network socket addresses. For example, when I restrict AF_PPPOX or AF_UNIX I get that issue. IIRC I also hit that issue when I had moved a file, but I forgot which one (I noticed it got autogenerated again). So I suspect it has to do with access to some file location where it stashes a config file. Fwiw, this works with tailscale just fine.
https://github.com/stevenwalton/.dotfiles/blob/master/skelet...
(docs for RestrictAddressFamilies) https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it ask you what server you want to connect to? Like.. THE ONE SERVING THE PAGE.
Just now I decided to connect to Jellyfin over tailscale and it's asking me to add a server; on 100.xxx, which is the jellyfin server which served the UI. And it doesn't seem to want to accept any answer as to what the server URL is.