Hey guys, this is a small experience report of me getting into Jellyfin. This community seems a bit dead, so let’s get into discussion. I am sure you have a lot to say about your Jellyfin projects.
I played with the thought of setting up Jellyfin for a longer time, because we got so mad of streaming enshittification. This googling “who streams xxx” just to see nobody does, another new streaming service I never heard about or I can rent it for 3,99 from fucking Jeff Bezos. I am not a person who watches a lot of movies or shows (not really a binge watcher), so Netflix is not really worth it for me. But from time to time I get the urge to watch Harry Potter or some other shit but then I can’t, because fuck you.
So I played with the thought of trying out Jellyfin, because I don’t want the hassle of handling DVDs and also I sometimes watch on devices like a phone or a tablet. It seemed super complicated with all this encoding transcoding stuff and also felt like a huge investment, as I didn’t have an old notebook here that I could use.
I decided to try it out on an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ I had lying around - I knew it was to weak to act as a Jellyfin server, but anyway. It worked like a charm, so I decided to get something more powerful. This was a very difficult research for me and I am still not sure if I went the right path. I know a little about gaming PCs, but I knew I needed something that does not use a lot of energy. On the web it seems that there is not really one single right way to host jellyfin? Everyone used something different… I stumbled across the “Dell Optiplex” series many people use and started looking out for then on eBay, learning about Intel processor generations and stuff like that (the Jellyfin docs recommend 11th or 12th gen, whatever that means).
I ended up with a Dell Optiplex 3070 Micro with an Intel i5-2,20 GHz, a 256GB NVMe, 16GB RAM and Windows 11 Pro. I bought it for about 120€, maybe that was a little too much but I didn’t care as I wanted that thing better sooner than later. After it arrived I crossed myself and immediately installed Debian to get rid of the plague. I set up Jellyfin with apt, docker is cool and stuff but I like it more the traditional way.
I didn’t have another internal HDD lying around, also there is not much space in this micro PC (btw it seems 2,5" != 2,5", they have different heights!), but I had an external 8TB HDD with external power supply. I know an internal HDD is probably more stable but well. So I mounted that one and modified fstab, a file I got to know recently on my Desktop PC after I formatted and partioned my dual boot Windows drive to ext4.
I decided going against docker and installing Jellyfin on bare metal, because I am a but old school and I like tweaking around with software. Revenge will come as soon as the system fails!
Whatever, I had some real problems with the permission settings. There were a lot of things I never came across before, e.g. groups. With a bit if google-fu I could finally solve these issues, but it took me some hours. After forgetting my credentials a couple if time I finally pushed a movie on the HDD, accessed Jellyfin via the browser and oh boy how fucking great is Jellyfin? I love it! It just looks so clean and polished! A real masterpiece for an open source software.
In the next step I bought a blu ray reader, which was not really easy because the guys in the makemkv forums are real nerds. As I am not interested in 4k (yet) I realized I won’t run into too much trouble. So I went with a Verbatim 43888, an external disc reader. It was a real struggle to set it up on Linux Mint at first. First, MakeMKV did not work, Open Disc was grayed out. After a lot of research I identified two independent problems/solutions:
- MakeMKVs latest version just doesn’t run on Linux. The solution is to build a lower version from source, I’ll find out which one it was in case somebody has the same problem.
- MakeMKV only detects the disc, if the program is already started and the disc is put in after. No idea why.
As a bonus struggle - the physical eject button does not work, I have to run eject /dev/sr0/ from Terminal.
After solving this problems, my Blu-Ray ripping started. I read a bit into all the formats and ended up ripping the mkv with MakeMKV and after encoding the files with a handbrake Matroschka setting. It all works fine.
So here I am know streaming to my mobile and my TV. For the TV I first tried another RPI3+ with Kodi installed, but honestly, it was an underwhelming experience. So I just bought a longer HDMI cable and now stream from my desktop PC to my TV, which is alright. Now my girlfriend also wants to stream when she is not home, so I set up tailscale. A wonderful easy piece of software!
So lastly, I bought all seasons of Gilmore Girls for 10€ and ripped them for my of. A downside, they are all in 4:3. It seems Netflix has a special production version which they can stream widescreen, but it isn’t published. Whatever, you know what my gf said? “Oh great, then I can cancel Netflix now?” I love that about her. She is not into tech, but she is so enthusiastic about the things I do. Also, she is really pissed from enshittification as well, but could never defend by herself.
I could go on for another half an hour, but I guess it is alright for now! Let’s start discussing! How was your experience getting into Jellyfin? Do you know the struggles? Ant questions or advices?
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I put it off for ages, and finally made the time late last year. It was about 1/10th as hard as I expected, and has been running on my Synology NAS (I know, I know) with hardly a hiccup. My wife picked it up a lot more readily than the half-baked solutions I’d been relying on before. Now she actually uses our music library instead of just streaming through Grayjay. It’s nice. That reminds me I need to get my son’s phone and laptop set up with his Jellyfin account, which only has access to appropriate content. Nice to be able to define that sort of thing.
I also have a pretty large collection of short animations that I’d like to add to Jellyfin, but I’m not sure how I want to go about it yet. Especially since it’s all very badly organised on my NAS.
I also did the but I also setup Jellyseer as a replacement for JustWatch (another bozo platform)
I haven’t set it up to auto download stuff with arr but now we can track what we want to watch and see what is coming up.
Prowlarr, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, transmissiond, now I just need something to clean up all the garbage files, like people filling a folder with .exes and .isos and naming it the thing that I want. Confuses the autodownloaders. Fuck those people.
I’ve come to love truenas scale, running a nas on my old computer and it has support for apps like jellyfin, plex, makemkv and handbrake.
I stream it to my tv with an 2019 Nvidia shield since apparently it has the best media format support out of the many android boxes.
I set it up for the wife and I a few years back for the same reason. Never looked back. It’s amazing
I really wanted Jellyfin to work, but the bottleneck I hit is the Roku app runs like ass. So much of the library just refused to play so there was no point moving forward with it.
Emby OTOH works fantastically! I still need to re-organize some videos, but I haven’t hit anything that outright refuses to play.
Fuck emby and fuck Roku
Stop advocating for solutions that are actively harmful to consumers. Emby is going down the path of plex and jellyfin exists because of this. Is it more convenient at times? Possibly, depending on your situation, but the more popular they get the more they will charge, the more they will entrench data collection methods, the more they will fuck you.
Roku is the second worst smart tv provider after google tv but to be fair all smart tv brands are absolute consumer hostile dogshit and the smart play here is to just not connect the tv to the internet. They’re arguably the worst, at least android tv lets you set a custom dns network (but android can get around pihole/adguard dns). Just get a cheap streaming box, tons of Chinese options are degoogled, very cheap (although tariffs made them worse of course), and can direct play lots of formats lowering energy costs for your server by lessening the need to transcode
First - I’m not paying Emby anything. Out of the box it’s a free solution and, unlike Jellyfin, it actually works instead of spinning and saying “Unable to play video.”
Second, I’m not talking about Roku televisions, I’m talking about the Roku streaming boxes for which there are Jellyfin and Emby apps.
Supporting them and advocating for others to do so is enabling hostile companies, end of story, even if you don’t give them money. Emby took an FOSS product then decided to close the source to make it proprietary and charge money for it. In fact, the more they see a large installed user base like you that’s not paying for transcoding the more likely they start to either monetize other features or find ways to monetize in other ways (like data collection). Yuck.
Roku televisions and streaming sticks all run the same Roku os so the comment is the same regardless. Roku has no respect for you. Try changing the dns of your wireless connection in the OS to any of the adguard dns servers to stop the litany of ads baked into Roku. It’s literally impossible to do.
Tbf on this point it’s an everyone is utter shit for the most part, as stated. Google is obviously one of the worst when it comes to data collection and disrespecting your privacy, Amazon is similar and runs Google, apple is better but $$$ (and require trust in apple not selling your data but at least they don’t plaster ads as obnoxiously throughout the UI), chinese no name boxes that are at least degoogled to a point but not fully, etc. your option is who is “least bad”
LOL - I don’t see any ads in my Roku. They might be there, but I’m never on the Roku screen long enough to see them.
It’s straight up lying to say a Roku doesn’t have ads plastered everywhere. Don’t lie to defend your shitty purchase
I didn’t say there aren’t ads, I’m saying I never see them. 😉
Roku devices have notoriously shitty CPUs and minimal RAM, of course they will run like shit.
True, but the Roku Emby app works fine.
I don’t think you understand that Emby operates off a million dollar yearly income from their fucking subscription model, while Jellyfin is an open source software made by people with their spare time.
Guess which one gets to afford hundreds of hours of dev time?
Wait, I’ve put in hundreds of hours of dev time into the Jellyfin Roku client.
Are you saying I could have been getting paid this whole time!?!? 😆
It doesn’t matter, to me, what the model is since a) I’m not paying for it and b) Jellyfin didn’t work with my setup.
Emby seems to be a lot easier to use like how Apple is more accessible to the general public compared to Android. You get similar features from both, only one is better UX, where the other has more customization
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From what I could tell, trying to play the videos on both the Jellyfin server and the Android app, they wouldn’t work either. So it wasn’t just the Roku app, although that was my primary use for it.
So I uninstalled the server, installed Emby, which even operates on the same local machine port as Jellyfin, and it all just worked. 🤷
Not using jellyfin yet, as lifetime plex pass is working out for me. But seriously, figure out docker. Once you figure out the docker compose file setup is a breeze.
I went from a windows install to docker on Ubuntu. Decided I didn’t like Ubuntu, and installed Mint. Literally all I had to do was install docker, cd to the directory where my docker compose file is, sudo docker compose up -d and everything was exactly as I left it.
Reinstalling every time I had to reinstall windows was so time consuming and never brought everything back as if nothing happened.
Currently have plex, all the *arr apps, qbittorrent/glueton all in docker. Should have done this years ago, but learning docker seemed daunting. Basically took a few hours of tinkering and I’m wondering what took me so long because it’s so so much better.
How nerds get laid.
The main issues I had with jellyfin went away after I switched to a dedicated NAS. I originally had set up and streamed from an RPi 3 and it did it’s best, but once 2 streams occurred or a sufficiently large format needed transcoding it would seize up and need a reboot. Since switching to chonkier hardware, I’ve never had another problem.
The only other issue I’ve had is due to the TV the app runs on, which craps the bed in specifics situations like setting things as “watched” lol. It’s also slow as hell, but that’s more related to the TV specs than jellyfin I think
