Fair enough. If your family are all tech savvy enough that that’s a good solution for them, then congratulations, and I’m jealous.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.

A question I have about this setup, because I’ve been contemplating out myself: If all the traffic flows through the VPS, I presume that will count against any usage limits / cost per GB with the VPS, right? Have you found that to be a problem with large file transfers or video streaming?