ℍ𝕖𝕝𝕚0𝕤

You’re overthinking. Just host it on any server with a domain name and use let’s encrypt certs if you want to access it from anywhere. TLS offers good encryption, I don’t get how you need a VPN on top of that.

For local access only, I’d just host it on a machine over the lan, self-signed certs for TLS, hell I would even settle with http in this case. As for your VPN app preventing you to access a local resource on your lan, if true, you should get rid of that nonsense.

I tried this, it’s nice indeed. The layout will require some getting used to for me, but I like how it lets me add my remote server as sftp bookmark and open files from there pretty seamlessly, even videos.

You can pay for ad-free. It’s an affordable one time purchase and it supports the dev’s work.

My friends and I use syncplay + mpv for this. It works well, and even though it’s designed around local file playback, you can add https URLs to the playlist. So this with nginx serving the files has been a great solution.

You can even play YouTube videos by adding yt-dlp to mpv, but that doesn’t reliably work right now as far as I can tell.