Craig Weber

I own a bunch of media, and I want to stream it to my devices as easily as with a streaming service, using affordable hardware. Today that is really hard, and I want to briefly lay out why and what could be done to improve it. The problem and solution space is extremely broad, so I'm going to speak abstractly, going into greater depth in specific areas in future posts.

The specific goal of this post is to start a conversation about what problems we face with the current media landscape and what we could do to fix them. I'm laying out my understanding of the problem space and my high-level vision for how it could be fixed in hopes that others (especially those with more expertise in media specifically) will offer their own visions or critique/refine mine.

As 🇺🇸🦅🆓 day approaches, I've been wanting to introduce my wife to the 1996 Will Smith film by the same name. I have the film on an external hard drive, hooked up to my Jellyfin media server which is accessible on my Tailscale VPN ("tailnet" in Tailscale parlance). However, neither our smart TVs nor our router support Tailscale, so I needed to figure out how to expose my media server (which is running as a Kubernetes service) to my LAN. This post will lay out my solution.