Just wish Jellyfin would support S3 compatible targets for media storage :/ point at bucket(s), scan/index/enrich, serve to clients

I've been working on a custom media server that does streaming, block-based storage on top of S3, with the local disk being used as a cache.

I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.

The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.

For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.

Is that wise though? I mean I understand the desire to use cheap off-site storage, but S3 clouds can be expensive when requesting files a lot, streaming data, lots of read/write operations.

(Disclaimer: this relates to the commercial project I run, but it is directly answering the parent)

It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.

Could you run a user space s3 filesystem that jellyfin thinks is a regular disk filesystem.

You can do this via rclone with Jellyfin.