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:

1. 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.
2. 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?