Good question, I’m also in tech. She does drive and of course opens bank accounts, but it’s like it all goes out the window when she needs to do anything remotely technical. I would say that most of the users I’ve encountered are not that bad, but she is unique in that way.
You replied to someone and said “my wife has no problem using tailscale”. Is your wife not another person? Sure, same household, but if you’re not running a pirate TV service, why does she need tailscale, and how is that different than sharing with my MIL?
Also, why do you keep using the terminology of “pirate tv service”? Why is it suddenly not a home media server if I want my mother in law to be able to use it? I don’t share with people outside of my family.
You seem to think that because you’re using Jellyfin, it’s automatically not piracy. But you certainly can do piracy with it, it has tools purpose built for it like Jellyseerr. So how is that not a “pirate tv service”?
Do you not know that you can also upload your own media rips to Plex? Is that still a “pirate tv service”? At what point do you assign the (fairly negative, at least legally) connotation of piracy to a service someone is hosting out of their homelab?
Too hard, she can’t even open a PDF file on her own.
Then it’s not a drop in replacement for Plex, is it?
I do NOT want to support my MIL’s network which is 3000 miles away. It simply will not happen or work for either of us. Until Jellyfin has a decent way to support remote users, I simply cannot change her over.
If Plex folded or somehow forced my hand, I would just kick off all of my family and use Jellyfin on my local network. They’d hate losing access, and I’d hate them paying $$$ for a thousand streaming services, but at this point, that’s what would happen.
Would you like to explain to my MIL about how to set up tailscale for her entire network so she can stream to her TV?
Seriously. Someone tried convincing me that it would be an easy lift to send my MIL across the country a preconfigured Pi so that she could have web browser access to Jellyfin. She only has a computer for doing taxes, and watches everything on her TV.
Not only would she get confused every step of the way, even if it was just plug & play, she would also blame me if ANYTHING happened on her network and want me to fly out to fix it.
I’m not about to take that responsibility just so she can watch the latest episode of 90 day fiance. I have enough pain when she needs to sign into Plex.
The other catch with WP is that there’s a lot of overhead, and you have to keep it updated to avoid security issues. Static site generators have minimal overhead and updates, but may not be as easy to use when building the site.
It’s much easier for me to manage if it’s a file issue though. It’s much more difficult to manage an actual network 3000 miles away, especially if something actually goes wrong. Basically, “it won’t play” can be checked locally. If it doesn’t play locally, I’m happy to fix it. But I’m not about to troubleshoot her network issues for her.
Saying I’m “supporting a chunk of her network” is like saying Netflix supports a chunk of their users’ networks. It’s just not true.