When it comes to cataloging and streaming movies, music, and TV shows on NAS or home servers, Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex are our three favorites. They're fantastic for bringing the entire household online and accessing both purchased media and free content available through external services. Installing these media platforms is easy, but setting everything up for remote access can be a little tricky. I'll show you how to configure Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex for seamless remote access so you can stream from home to anywhere in the world.
Plex is “set it and forget it”
With a Plex account
Plex is either praised or criticized for its centralized login system, which requires the platform to “call” Plex's servers and handle user logins. On one hand, this means your media streaming service is never completely local. It leverages Plex's servers for various tasks, including displaying content not stored on your media server. The flip side, however, is seamless external access. Because Plex communicates with your server installation, the service can maintain connections with all clients even if your home network's external IP changes.
Because Plex communicates with your server installation, the service can maintain connections to all clients even if the external IP of your home network changes.
No user input is required. All you need to do is enable a feature in the Plex server dashboard to allow external access and Plex should do the rest. As long as your network is up and running, you should have no problems connecting clients to Plex even when you're outside of your home LAN. All you need is your Plex login information. It's also a free feature, so you don't need Plex Pass to enjoy flawless external access to all your streaming content, although the fantastic Plexamp app is included.
Plex
Plex is a popular media cataloging and streaming platform that lets you keep all your purchased media in one place for anyone to use. It can even connect to other services, including Netflix.
Configuring Emby and Jellyfin
Reverse proxies are a powerful tool
VPNs and reverse proxies are your new best friends for setting up services like Emby and Jellyfin for external access. Jellyfin and Emby don't use the same account configuration as Plex and require a bit more manual work to make them accessible from outside the LAN without your dynamic external IP address breaking everything. You could use a VPN to specifically grant access to your LAN and NAS, though you'll need to remember the ports for different services. Another option is a reverse proxy, which can allow every service running to use the same domain with more user-friendly URLs.
NAS operating systems support the creation of a reverse proxy that can use an external service to maintain a connection to your NAS even when the IP changes dynamically. An example of this would be Synology's synology.me Service for branded NAS enclosures. With a reverse proxy on your Synology NAS, you can yournas.synology.me/jellyfin to connect remotely using a folder for each running service. Unless you use a reverse proxy or other solution, you will need to edit the server details on each client when the private IP address changes.
jellyfish fin
Jellyfin is one of the best Plex alternatives you can get, and that's because of its open-source nature and powerful feature set. There are apps for virtually every platform, and running your own server is completely free.
Emby
Emby is a paid alternative to Plex with some unique features you won't get anywhere else, like smart home integration and HDR tone mapping. The only downside is that you have to pay money to use some features you get for free elsewhere, like caching your video files.