Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Yes kind of. I selfhost netbird (managment + signal + relay all on my own VPS at https://nb.mydomain.com) and I share access to some media stuff with my family. Most of them are on appleTVs and a couple androidTV boxes. The problem is getting these TV devices enrolled is way harder then it should be. On my phone and laptop the Google SSO login works great, but on the TV clients I cant get the interactive SSO / device login flow to work against my self-hosted setup, so I’m stuck handing out setup keys instead.
The setup key route sort of works but its painful — typing a long key with the apple TV remote or even copy/paste is low key miserable, and worse, half the time the device registers in the dashboard but then just sits there on “connecting” forever and never actually comes up. So now I’m in a spot where the EASY devices (phones/laptops) get nice SSO and the HARD devices (the TVs my non-technical family actually use) get the worst possible onboarding. It’s kind of backwards.
Describe the solution you’d like
I’d love for the tvOS and AndroidTV clients to support the same “nice” interactive SSO experience that works on desktop/mobile and works for your cloud version, but for self-hosted instances — not just cloud. Basically the QR-code + device-code flow where the TV shows a code, you scan it with your phone, sign in to your IdP on the phone (in my case Google, brokered through the embedded IdP), confirm the code matches, and the TV authenticates itself. No typing keys on a remote.
If it already half-works and its just config, then maybe clearer docs on exactly what needs to be enabled server-side for self-host (device auth provider settings etc) would go a long way. But ideally it just works out of the box on self-host like it seems to on cloud.
Describe alternatives you’ve considered
- Setup keys — works but the remote-typing is awful and I’m hitting the “registers but stuck on connecting” issue on at least one appleTV (havent fully root caused if thats a relay/port thing on my end yet).
- Enrolling a phone and airplaying/casting to the TV — works for some people but its a UX downgrade, they cant just open the app.
- Putting a little always-on box (pi or similar) as a subnet router so the TV doesnt need a client — adds cost/complexity and kind of defeats the point of a native TV client existing.
- Fronting Google with keycloak/authentik to get groups etc — but I deliberately moved away from running another IdP, so I’d rather not.
Additional context
Self-hosted setup, embedded IdP with Google added as an external login (personal google account, no Workspace). Phones + laptops enroll via SSO with no issues. The TV clients are really the only gap. I think appleTV/androidTV are a bigger deal for selfhosters than people realize — theyre cheap, always-on, low power, and sit right where you want media access, so smoothing out enrollment there would be a really nice win. Happy to test betas on real hardware if that helps.