Hi TCP users,
Currently, I have a homelab server that runs Jellyfin with direct access to local media content and a reverse proxy point to it. While it works well for people in Europe (where the server is), it is quite slow for some of my friends who are living in Asia. I am having some options in mind:
- Hire a VPS in Asia and set up another Jellyfin instance there. This works but I don’t really want to have two Jellyfin instances with two databases and also accessing to local media content will be curbersome to manage.
- Hire a VPS in Asia and set up a CDN but I am not sure if it will ever work with Jellyfin ?
So I would like to ask do you know any things about this and any idea to improve this situation ?
Thank you very much!
So it’s not just me. The peering between europe and asia IS crap!
I’ve been to thailand in november and the connections to europe were hit or miss the whole time. The latency was poor and the reliability varied day by day.
The only thing that made any difference was switching providers on the EU side. It seems that some ISPs have better peering than others.
Also lowering the MTU for the vpn tunnel seemd to help a lot, but that might’ve been a placebo.
Define “slow”. Pages hang before loading? Or it often stops to buffer a stream?
don’t know what “slow” means in your case, but jellyfin clients have a buffer setting and increasing it should improve things for them.
Even large streaming services drop their servers close to the users to make the experience good. They just do better at scaling.
You could federated authentication so only one ldap service is maintained. You could also sync media from one device to the other so you don’t need to manually update both.
You’re describing a CDN. You can’t afford it.
I’d look more into boosting whatever your uplink is versus trying to distribute to localized users.
The uplink isn’t the problem as it works for viewers in Europe.
Uplink is exactly the problem. Not sure why you think otherwise. The internet doesn’t work by multicast.
Maybe we don’t talk about the same. The uplink at his router isn’t the problem, there is enough upload speed so that others in Europe can stream. Users in Asia don’t have enough bandwidth, so there’s a bottleneck somewhere in between.
And yes, a VPN could help by routing the traffic through other hops, but chances are that it doesn’t help or even make it worse, but it’s worth trying.
It’s probably not bandwidth but latency and packet loss that’s the problem.
Latency shouldn’t be a big problem if it doesn’t have massive spikes. Packet loss could be a problem, seems like Jellyfin doesn’t have an option zu increase the buffer size which may help. Or the problem is in combination with transcoding.
Bandwidth does not degrade over distance. That’s not how that works…
Again, I’m confused on what you’re suggesting the actual issue is here.
Exactly, bandwidth doesn’t degrade over distance, so why would the uplibk bandwidth be the issue for Asia when its fine for Europe.
If the uplink bandwidth is more than sufficient for users in Europe, and it doesn’t degrade over distance, then why is the same uplink not enough for the exact same thing in Asia?
Tailscale, headscale, or something along those lines may help optimize the route but as others have said to resolve this is an actual fashion you’d need a cdn which requires significant geo-redundant hardware which comes at a pretty significant cost. That being said I think your friend has a good shot if you implement the former.
I was trying to stream my Jellyfin server on vacation…Over Tailnet I couldn’t reliably stream anything. Over VPN it was as good as local. I can’t believe it’s just a routing issue but I wasn’t proxied so it should have been the same. So a VPN for one user might fix the issue. The headaches of segmenting the network on that VPN are another problem even if the hardware/router is capable but doable.
You unfortunately cannot solve this yourself, this is where 800lb gorillas like akamai outclass self-hosted.
Netflix alone has many thousands of isps participating in Open Connect alone, these providing CDN peering points all over the world and making Netflix only a few hops away for more end users.
I am in basically the same situation as you and my single asian user has no issue with it
you don’t necessarily have to host another Jellyfin instance, I would find a server somewhere in the middle of your current Europe server and your Asian homies and setup a reverse proxy there.
The only hassle with this is you’re going to need a way to expose Jellyfin to it, a VPN would prevent port forwarding 443, perhaps split tunneling?
IMHO Jellyfin is processing everything it sent to clients. So I do not think it possible to put it behind SDN( may be it possible if server side transcoding is off) Please define slow. Slow on what part? It should be like 250ms RRT to your server which is not much for web-based apps.
This may be completely untrue but maybe the remote users could get a vpn with a server near yours? Without having the slightest idea that it does I could imagine it could help.
