Jellyfin/Plex/Media Servers

[hesastopsiiiiign]

Who’s running a media server? I know @badeline has mentioned Jellyfin a bit. Anyone else?

Disney+ seems to have finally shut us out of my sister in law’s account and my wife wants to get our own. The kids only really watch one or two shows on there so I figure I can acquire them another way and maybe set up a media server to host them. Currently I only have an 11 year old laptop which is absolutely fucked and a raspberry pi 3. I’m not sure either of them are up to the task so what is the minimum requirements anyone would recommend?

[almal100]

I’ve currently got a plex server running. I’ve only got a pretty old all in one pc thing I got off my dad and an xbox and that works perfectly to get stuff on the telly

[harru]

if you have a firestick or any sort of android smart tv or box, then Stremio with some ‘addons’ is much less faff than Plex, in my experience

(costs about £3 a month, has everything)

[hesastopsiiiiign]

I do have a fire stick somewhere in the house, will have a hunt. It’s a fairly old one, probably got it about 7 or 8 years ago. Any limitations on hardware/software versions?

[badeline]

I’ve got jellyfin set up on a raspberry pi 5, but also got it working on raspberry pi 4.

I use this site a lot pimylifeup they say it will work on a raspberry pi 3 so long as you don’t need to transcode a lot.

for a home streaming set up you probably dont need to transcode a lot. transcode is when it converts one format to another on the fly, either because the client device (smart tv, phone app) cant play the native format (most stuff ripped from dvd or bluray will be fine), or to reduce the bitrate to save bandwidth (more of an issue if accessing over the internet rather than home). Only complication to that is subtitles, which sometimes need to be burnt in on the fly (but there is a format you can download to prevent that).

it is really easy to set up, just install raspberry pi os on the sd card, install docker this installs apps as containers that have everything they need to run, optionally install portainer which gives you a nice graphic interface to set up docker containers if you want to avoid using the command line. Once that is done installing jellyfin is as easy as pasting this docker compose file:

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/LONDON
    volumes:
      - /path/to/jellyfin/library:/config
      - /path/to/tvseries:/data/tvshows
      - /path/to/movies:/data/movies
    ports:
      - 8096:8096
    restart: unless-stopped

all you have to do is update those paths to the folders with your stuff.

then ipaddress:port will be how you access it from browser or apps e.g 192.168.1.217:8096
if you want to access from outside your network lots of options, pivpn, tailscale, cloud flare tunnel.

I obviously can’t condone piracy but SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr are things that exist

use makemkv to rip dvd/bluray https://www.makemkv.com (as mkv packages up all the audio tracks and subtitles into one file, whereas something like an mp4 cant)

use handbrake to compress file size https://handbrake.fr can reduce blu ray rip file size considerably without noticeable loss of quality (streaming HD has lower bit rate than blu-ray and looks pretty much the same, so a lot of scope to reduce file sizes)

probably the best thing I have done, can just pretend I live in the past

[roastthemonaspit]

I don’t understand a single word of this thread.

[CHAIRMAN_LMAO]

I have an old NAS drive (Synology, must be about 12 years old) which I store our films on and stream to an Apple TV and watch using an app called Infuse (a bit like Plex). Probably a bit OTT for what you need.

My TV also lets you just plug a USB drive into the back and play movie files that way. Might be worth a go?

[hesastopsiiiiign]

I use docker in work every day so I’m familiar with all that I’ll maybe play about with it this weekend and see how I get on, although I didn’t know about Stremio before so I’m going to look into that too.

[hesastopsiiiiign]

That’s kind of what’s driven me to look into all this. Our TV allows for USB sticks too but it seems to have trouble with file formats at random. I’m guessing it must be whatever way a file is encoded but I’m getting fed up of starting movies only for them to have no sound

[badeline]

Could use handbrake to re encode, H.264 is the most compatible codec, takes ages to convert but can queue them up and forget about it, and could use it to identify which ones aren’t in that format so you know which ones won’t work

[profligate]

my mate has a plex server. he says it’s fucking fantastic on a minimal set up but make sure your cpu has intel quicksync if you go without a gfx card, or just more or less any cpu if you do have a gfx card (if you want transcoding).

he also says plex pass is worth it, but what am I to know.

[Mert]

I’ve spent the last six months building my plex server and now I don’t have a single streaming service sub. It feels FANTASTIC

[colossalhorse]

Had a plex server running for a bit but switched to Jellyfin when I switched to Linux. I miss Plex automatically doing subtitles but besides that Jellyfin works nicely. Oh and you can find the Plex app on most smart TVs whereas I have to use a firestick for Jellyfin.

[Mert]

Behold! Some snapshots of a man’s descent into archiving!

lots of work still to be done, lots of things to track down.

[CHAIRMAN_LMAO]

The whole thing can turn into a massive time suck to be honest, although I quite enjoy it. It was driving my family nuts though, so we are now set on the Apple TV + NAS solution forevermore. It’s not the cheapest solution, but is the best I’ve found. I didn’t like having to have a computer running 24/7 as a server - way better to have a NAS with tonnes of capacity that powers up and down as you need it.

It’s possible that it would have been cheaper to just pay for all of the subscriptions, it definitely would have been less hassle.

I’d give @harru’s suggestion a go if you already have a Firestick knocking about and see how you go. Can be a very slipperly slope though.

[hesastopsiiiiign]

If I have a big folder of films, can I add tags to each one like 90s/USA/Action/Schwarzenegger/Cameron for Terminator 2 and if I search for any one of those it’ll come up? Or even better is the UI able to handle this in the same sort of way Netflix does? What sort of HD space have you got? I don’t have a lot of money so looking at a 2TB one

[CHAIRMAN_LMAO]

Apps like Plex do this for you. Provided the file is named properly, with a year, it’ll take metadata including genre, cast and cover art from The Movie Database (TMDB). Not sure if you can add your own genres but you can search for a cast or crew member, or a year, and it will filter your library that way.

So as long as your file looks like ‘Terminator 2 Judgment Day 1991.mkv’ you’d be able to search for ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’, or ‘1991’ or ‘James Cameron’ and it’d appear as part of the results.

2TB is enough to start with I think. I have 4TB and I’m starting to run out of space, but I don’t mind binning things I’m not going to rewatch. When I have some spare cash I will replace the NAS drive as it’s about 12 years old and it’s a matter of time before it fails.

You could test it by installing Plex Server on your laptop, sticking a handful of movies on there, then installing Plex on your old Fire Stick and seeing what happens. Pretty quick to do. Only issue is that you need to have Plex Server running constantly in order to watch, so you need to keep the laptop on and stop it going to sleep.

[lwt]

I used to use plex for everything but was constantly juggling space, now I stremio with realdebrid for 90% of things and I’ll use plex for things that are too niche/I can only find on private trackers

I use an addon which lets me put letterboxd lists into stremio. I just use my watchlist but you can set it up for whatever list you want to make and it gives you a carousel for each list. Sometimes it’s a bit rubbish at refreshing though

[hesastopsiiiiign]

@lwt

an addon which lets me put letterboxd lists into stremio

Very interesting. Every time I think I’m decided on one approach, something like this pops up and starts me thinking of the other!

[Mert]

I’ve been meaning to look into radarr and sonarr for years now but it seems complex and I cba