this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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If you have a machine at her place that is on most of the time you can have tailscale on that device and then make it ssh into itself with ssh portforwarding on!
Edit: You can also selfhost headscale and do the same as the comment below said
What in the goddamn fuck, sir
Step 1) Install tailscale (headscale also exists if you wanna fully self-host it)
Step 2) Done, solved
That doesn't slove the problem if your Smart TV doesn't support tailscale or something like Wireguard. Using another machine connected to a VPN like for example Tailscale/Headscale and then using ssh portforwarding allows you to access the service(jellyfin) on the device without support.
It would be like this:
Jellyfin <-- Tailscale/Headscale <--- Machine forwarding the jellyfins port <-- Smart TV
This can be done with a command like this:
ssh -L 0.0.0.0:8096:jellyfin_tailnet_ip:8096 -f -N user@machine
Most people are not gonna go that route unfortunately. I want to love JF, but the remote access is a big sticking point, especially for non tech relatives.
It bugs me when people just say tailscale like that solves it all. It's very useful and solves a lot of problems, but not all. Unfortunately.
I completely agree, Tailscale will not just solve your issues. If you want to have is as simple as possible for your users you are going to need to expose it publicly for your users. And the reason I posted the comment above is to share a solution that has worked for me to get my users "Smart"TVs to work. Honestly if someone where to make a service that provides a "plex networking" solution for jellyfin I think allot of people would consider using it and leave plex for good!
Doesn't emby have some kind of "connect" feature? I wish jf would do something like that
You know, there's probably a market for a hardware solution to do that. Wrap it up in a nice user interface, Family VPN bridge, expose JF servers.
My mom lives 900 miles away and she can barely turn a computer on
I set up a free dns from duckdns.org and pointed it to my jellyfin server. All my parents had to do was to use that https://randomserver.duckdns.org/ as the server url in the jellyfin app.
Doesn't that mean your jellyfin server is directly exposed to the Internet? The very thing everyone constantly warns against?
I'm still on Plex, one of my biggest hangups with JF is that the remote access is kludgy
It's been running on caddy + duckdns for 5 years or more now. I use a non standard jellyfin port for the port forwarding, so that probably helps. Also, there's probably an aspect of security by obscurity.
Yeah then this might not be a great idea for you, unless you have the possibility to fix a machine if you visit. But I want to make it clear this is not a fix all thing just trying to help :D
<3