Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
People into Jellyfin use smart TVs? I haven't connected mine to the internet.
Not every Jellyfin user is also the server administrator. If someone sets up a server and shares that server with 5 people, most of those users aren't concerned with the privacy implications of how they connect to the server; they just want to consume content as easily as they do with Netflix, Disney, etc.
That's true but every Jellyfin host has to be.
I do? I don't love Android TV but I only have so much time to fight to the good fight with shit.
I would like a less smart tv but I don't want to by a 7 year old Nvidia Shield and suffered paralysis by analysis trying to decide on on an Android TV box.
So here we are, I use jellyfin on a smart TV
Out of curiosity why are you reluctant to buy a Shield?
I was on the fence for a while but I've been extremely happy with it and have only run into minimal issues (and significantly less than with my smart tv before).
I have a shield. Without setting up a custom launcher it is an ad ridden nightmare (by default). Even though I spent a comparatively large amount of money for old hardware, I still get bloat.
But I don't know any better option that is easy to use and has a simple android box like remote so. :/
This feels like some really niche gatekeeping.
Family connect to my server with tv. If tv is in the same house everything is blocked and select things are whitelisted.
It's handy to share media with my family! The Roku app works OK
We have both.
Kodi use Jellyfin for its media library and Kodi is excellent for a lot of the TV we watch. catch Up TV has replaced the decoder for watching terrestrial TV.
One thing that sucks in Kodi though is Arte (a franco-german channel that is a leans towards "intellectual"). For that, the LG WebOS app is much better than the Kodi add-on. Other than that 1 app, we could happily plug Kodi into digital signage panel if they weren't stupidly expensive.
It's relatively easy to restrict a smart tv to TLS/HTTPS traffic only using your router and a dns adblocker.
Its even easier to never let it on the network.
just saying its possible
You have to do a lot of work. You would have to keep up on what domains it's using (which were in the dozens four years ago for samsung), and make sure it doesn't use some as kill switches if it finds something blocked.
We aren't stopping just ads, we are stopping spying, data sharing, snooping, network mapping, etc.
Yeah. To be honest on the DNS side it would probably be far easier to just do a whitelist instead, block everything except your specific service. and yeah, its a stupid amount of work. i hate smart tvs but i'll be damned if im gonna pay extra for a streaming box =|
pretty cheap relatively speaking, and usually a lot more flexible depending on what you use.
to get something as flexible as my android tv i'd need an nvidia shield and those are going on ten years old at this point. maybe if/when they do a hardware refresh, assuming sideloading isn't completely impossible by then.
How does it help to let the smart tv talk via encrypted channels?
no it helps to block everything that isnt just netflix or whatever streaming service you use. you combine a DNS adblock along with blocking all the unused ports and it severely limits the communications. you could also add a vpn to add another layer of security. idk about jellyfin but most streaming services i know use https/443 to stream to your tv. so youre only allowing the specific service you want and only on a specific port. buncha great dns blocklists here https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists, and a smart tv specific one for pihole here https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/SmartTV.txt
Hardcoded IPS circumvent DNS blocks.
Restricting ports doesn't do anything since the TV isn't running a service, it is contacting one.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Not sure if you mean hardcoded DNS IPs or hardcoded "phone home" IPs. Hardcoded DNS addresses in devices are annoying, the only way i've found to get around that is using destination nat rules (DNAT) which requires more than a consumer router typically. hardcoded phone home IPs would get blocked by your firewall. you're right that most firewalls are set up by default to implicitly allow outbound traffic. you set up a rule that explicitly denies all outbound traffic from the TV, then only allow port 443 (or whatever port your streaming service uses) on the specific IP/IPs that your service uses. Here's Netflix's published IP info for example.
edit also i'm fully aware it's fucking ridiculous that we as consumers have to go through this much rigamarole. you shouldnt have to be a literal network engineer to do something as simple as have an internet-connected tv that doesnt spy on you.
Ah that makes sense! Thank you
I just run mine on a nvidia shield. I dunno why people feel the need to give the smart tv your data.