The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.
Leave Kodi behind in 2010 and switch over to Jellyfin for better results.
That’s the correct answer.
All that kodi hassle killed my brain. Nowadays I have a jellyfin server and a wifi6 router streams everything to a roku device I bought for 11€. Never saw some buffering again.
FWIW I have jellyfin as well already, it’s also on the machine serving the nfs shares. I would expect streaming over lan to always be a lighter load then sending a transcoding request through the internet and back to the machine four feet away, but I could be wrong. I am always curious though what people are using as jellyfin clients for their TVs. How are you actually getting jellyfin into your living room? I had hoped to use a dedicated pi4, and I’ve already gone down the route of trying to boot to a light desktop with an auto loading chrome kiosk window to my jellyfin server, but those results were less than ideal too.
Why would your Jellyfin traffic need to go over the Internet if it’s on your local network? You should be able to install the Jellyfin app on your smart TV/Roku/etc or use the web client from a computer, point it at the Jellyfin local IP address, and view it over your LAN.
And at best reroute the traffic before going outside
Yeah, a lot of routers support custom DNS routes, so just set your device to use your router for DNS and set routes to forward traffic to your NAS. Boom, problem solved and you still get to use HTTPS inside your house.
Traffic for a local Jellyfin server should definitely not be going over the internet. Also any reasonably modern client should be able to direct play most media without transcoding.
As for my own Jellyfin setup, one TV has an Nvidia shield plugged in and is using the standard Android TV client. The other is a Samsung smart TV onto which I have side-loaded the Jellyfin Tizen app.
Using the local address for the jellyfin instance solved things. I have no idea why whatever jellyfin is doing via jellycon is somehow more performant than just streaming via smb or nfs in vanilla kodi but 🤷♂️. Good pull.
You know once I expose a service to the internet and get a nice easy to remember url I practically forget that I can still access locally. I should check that out.
There are a few options there.
As someone else mentioned if you’re using IPv6 then it doesn’t matter, you’re already routing internally even if you’re using the public DNS name, no extra work required.
All the rest are for IPv4.
If you’re not behind CGNAT some routers/gateways are also smart enough with their routing to recognise when they need to route back to their own external IP and will loop back locally instead of making any hops out to the internet. Again, if this is the case for you then no additional work is required other than perhaps running a traceroute to confirm.
Another option is to add a local DNS entry for the name you’re using to resolve to a local IP address instead of your public address. The complexity (or even possibility) of this is going to vary considerably with your setup. If you’re running your own local DNS e.g. pihole or similar then it’s trivial. This is how mine is set up.
If all your clients are going to be on PCs (or devices you have more than the typical manufacturer allowed modicum of control over) then you can do something kind of like the previous, just with all your local
hostsfiles.If none of the above are options, then you’ll unfortunately have to fall back on using a local name/address, which means a slightly different client setup for devices you use exclusively in your home versus ones you might use elsewhere.
There are dedicated Jellyfin clients but I mainly just use the web client that is part of the server 90% of the time.
I use Chromecast to watch jellyfin on my TV. My host PC is hardwired, and obviously the Chromecast is through WiFi
We’re a googleless house as much as possible. I did consider going down the chrome cast route but it’s less than ideal on iOS.
Transcoding reduces bandwidth usage significantly
Also video traffic doesn’t pull that much by todays standards
EASY KILLER
I DON’T SEE ANY JELLYFIN DISTROS
“JUST ENOUGH OS FOR JELLYFIN?” no
Though jellyfin/emby as the back end works really well
Kodi/LibreELEC is awesome for all the different stuff you can add in
EDIT for typos
You can install it anywhere. You just run the container with you media directories passed though. They have lots of documentation
It is way easier than Kodi
Oh yeah I am on board with jellyfin and emby all the way 100%
Kodi/LibreELEC is just the full suite, especially with home assistant. Use the addon and enjoy one interface for every single piece of media, cutting out each apps “eye candy” and clutter, and enjoy your tunes with visualizers!
Add-ons for everything
Moonlight for game streaming, tied into my whole home remote control and home assistant for ease of use for everyone in the family.
It’s all pretty slick.
Once you get it setup just make a backup and roll that out on the other machines needed.