Selfhosted

The biggest problem with that Jellyfin to this day is that you can’t.

Seems like every new open source selfhosted app implements OIDC compatibility, but for some reason, I can only assume is technical debt, Jellyfin hasn’t.

To be totally honest I'm not sure you can harden jellyfin enough for public Internet exposure without also breaking basic functionality of the platform.

This is why everyone is always pushing so hard for a VPN/Tailnet of some kind. The public internet is a bit to much of a wild west to be exposing arbitrary services to it unless you really know what you're doing.

Run the jellyfin in a container that only has read privileges to the videos ( make sure you can't get out to your whole NAS from there), put that behind a Cloudflaired tunnel.

It's not technically secure, but if they can't get a foothold in your network and the only thing they can access is your video catalog, that's a reasonable amount of risk.

Secure is relative, you should be aware that jellyfin itself has security issues https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 most of which are harmless, but at least one is fairly serious and allows people to watch your media without authentication, and adding an extra layer of authentication on the proxy would likely cause issues with clients.

That being said, if you're okay with those security issues what I would do is have a cheap VPS, connect both machines to tailscale, and have something like Caddy on the VPS to do the forwarding.

Another way:

Expose using caddy. Use basic auth for the web UI only. This exempts the Jellyfin app clients from basic auth that they don’t support but requires it before anyone even gets to the Jellyfin UI. This obfuscates the fact that your endpoint is even a Jellyfin end point.

For a remote and non-technical user I would say IP whitelisting offers a decent tradeoff.

On your end you expose your jellyfin port to internet, but restrict at the router level to your user's client IP address as soon as you have it. Obviously in practice this works best if the address does not change often.

A reverse proxy is what you are looking for. I recommend Caddy.

You’ll also need a domain, but they can be had for very cheap.

I'm kinda disappointed with this thread, I'm in a similar position to OP, but all the responses are just like "use a reverse proxy and make your URL hard to guess" and other measures which are not very secure. \

It seems like that's about as good as you can get at the moment, because the mobile apps barf if you try to add in auth in front of the reverse proxy, but a lot of people seem to be providing this advice like it's good enough rather than as good as you can get.

Ask them to visit https://ipv4.icanhazip.com/ and give you back the number, then whitelist in your webserver, as well as your LAN/VPN range, deny rest. Explain they can only reach jellyfin from their home internet. Repeat if they get 403 forbidden after they get a new WAN IP.

That or VPN like openziti, wireguard but gets more complicated.

You can do a reverse proxy + authelia (or other auth service). It's still more risky than a VPN IMO, buts wayyyy better than some of the other options in this thread

Set up a reverse proxy with https always on. And get a good (physical) firewall, preferably something akin to opnsense, pfsense, openwrt. Exposing is always a risk, and if you do want it, you have to bear the responsibility for your own security. Keep things up to date, set up monitoring and a good logging system (Wazuh) comes to mind.

Exposure means a security risk. How you deal with that security risk is your choice.

Cloudflare and the likes forbid usage of their stuff for these things.

Perhaps (and I know I might be weird) running pangolin on something like hetzner? (Which I do)

If client certificates and basic auth is not supported by jellyfin:

• reverse proxy
• strong random subdomain
• wildcard certificate
• tls1.3 only
• doh/dot only

1-3 make random scanners unable to find your service, 4&5 even hide it from your ISP. Dot/doh service will still know your subdomain, so be your own dot/doh ! :D

Not at all, there's legal risk if you're hosting your blurays. Cloudflare even explicitly forbids such use. VPN or nothing imo.

Put Jellyfin and a reverse proxy in an isolated vlan or DMZ, with no ability to reach into your lan at all and everyone connects in the same way. Its just movies, thats all you lose if it gets hacked. Set up some monitoring too in case it becomes a botnet node so you can destroy it and start over.