FlickWatch your home media library away from home with Tailscale
Your media server sits at home. You're on a train, in a hotel or at a friend's place. Opening ports on your router to reach it is fiddly and risky. A private VPN like Tailscale is the simpler way: your phone and your server join the same private network and talk to each other directly, wherever they are.
Flick can add a media server by address, including a Tailscale or other VPN address, so your home library plays as if you were on your own Wi-Fi.
What you need
- A DLNA / UPnP media server at home (a NAS, Plex, Jellyfin, a router with USB storage). See turning one on.
- A free Tailscale account.
- Flick Pro, which includes playback from media servers.
Set it up
- Install Tailscale on the server. Synology and QNAP have Tailscale packages. On a Mac, Windows or Linux PC running Plex or Jellyfin, install the normal Tailscale app. If the media server is on a device that can't run Tailscale (like a router), set up another computer at home as a Tailscale subnet router.
- Install Tailscale on your iPhone and sign in to the same account.
- Find the server's Tailscale address. In the Tailscale admin console, each device has a 100.x.y.z address and a MagicDNS name.
- Add the server in Flick. In the Network tab, add a server by address and enter that Tailscale address (with the port your media server uses, if it needs one).
- Turn on Tailscale on your phone whenever you're away, and play from the server in Flick as usual.
Tips
- Mobile data: high-bitrate 4K files can use several gigabytes per hour. Smaller files or Wi-Fi are kinder to your data plan.
- Other VPNs work too, such as WireGuard or your router's built-in VPN. Flick only needs an address it can reach.
Flick – Video Player is free on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac.