ULTIMATE Jellyfin Media Server Guide - Install, Setup, Libraries (PART 1)

hello everybody this is teca and it is finally here this is going to be part one of two of my jellyfin server guide in this video we're gonna go over installation we're gonna go over setting up libraries and some additional tips and tricks when it comes to adding extra hard drives things like that now you may be asking yourself what is jellyfin and i did a video a couple months ago going over the differences between jellyfin mb and plex the three more popular media server clients out there and in that video i explained what jellyfin is and why i chose it over some of its competitors basically it's the free and open source uh proportions of mb that have been forked over and continued as its own project so first things first you're gonna need a way to actually host this server now for me personally i host my media server or my jellyfin instance on a small little mini pc that i have in here in my server cabinet now hosting it on a little mini pc works perfect because a lot of the times the actual media encoding isn't too intense a lot of the times it's done on the client side so whatever device is actually streaming the media handles that obviously depending on the format and things like that you could also use a older laptop and just turn that into a media server you could technically use like a raspberry pi or you can host it on some website some cloud instance such as something like uh lenode which happens to be the sponsor of this video lenode is the largest independent cloud service provider out there i've been using it for quite some time now to host my next cloud instance toes to minecraft server and for little projects off and on like this it's been absolutely wonderful they have server locations all over the country and actually all over the world wherever you are on this planet chances are you're going to be within a decent range of a lenode server that you can use to host your lenods no matter what you're doing whether it be building projects hosting a wordpress site basically anything that you could do on a linux server instance you could do within a lenote instance additionally they have fantastic customer support i'm not the brightest tool in the shed so whenever i ran into any issues or needed help doing anything they were there with for me a surprisingly quick reply and better yet you could try lenode today for basically free uh if you use the link below or go to lenove.com forward slash tech hut you could get a 60 day 100 credit so you could try it out play around with it and like i said i've been using it on nexcloud if you're interested in xcloud i do recommend you check out my installation tutorial where i go over setting it up on the node with a domain name the proper certificates things like that highly recommended so thank you lenode for sponsoring this video go ahead and click the link down below so now on to part one of our guide which is the actual installation now i am going to be installing this on a ubuntu server instance and that's going to be the primary focus of this video but you can easily install this on windows on windows you just run the exe file and you're generally good to go you could also do this on arch fedora whatever you want so right now we are on my main desktop computer i'm assuming at this point you already have a machine in your home or you're using the node or something that has ubuntu server installed if you need help installing ubuntu server i'll link to a video down below but what i'm going to connect to now is a fresh install of ubuntu server that i have on a mini pc locally on my home network and to connect to any server you just want to go ssh makes you actually have open ssh installed on that server and then we're going to type in my username and then the local ip of that server obviously if you're using something external from your network you're going to want to type in the proper ip address for that server for me you can see here i am using the ip address um ending in 66. if you're not sure what your server's ip address is you could actually go ahead and go onto your server just type in ipa and it will give that to you but if you think that's going to take too much work you could go onto your router's web page or your router portal and figure out via the devices page on there but this is what i'm going to connect to so i'm just going to hit enter this is my first time connecting so i'm going to hit yes type in the password and now we are connected now one thing i will note this is ubuntu and the actual installation process is actually the easiest step out of everything this is what we're basically following right here off of the official jellyfin docks if i go ahead and scroll around here you can see we have debian centos fedora arch portable dlls you could do this on any generic linux system mac os windows etc so i'll link to this in the description and this is where you can go and copy and paste all the links or all the commands that i'm going to be using so let's get this out of the way and proceed with the installation the first step calls to make sure we have this package right here this is going to basically allow us to download it i'm pretty sure ubuntu ships with this by default now it didn't so it's good we went ahead and grabbed that package and next what we're going to want to do is go ahead and import the gpg key so we can do this properly so you just put that command in hit enter and now we're going to want to go ahead and add the repository configuration to our sources and we could do that with a simple echo command here so you just go ahead and copy and paste this you can see it adds the https repo.jellyfin.org into the apt source list jellyfind.list so go ahead and hit enter and then once it does that we should be able to do a sudo apt update to go ahead and give our repositories a refresh you can see right there the repo jellyfin is now in there so we should be able to simply install sudo apt install and jellyfin and this is going to grab a couple different packages it's going to grab the jellyfin server instance as well as jellyfin ffmpeg as well as the jellyfin web portal so go ahead and hit enter and you can see all the packages these are the ones i was just mentioning as well as all of the different dependencies that it's going to offer you so we're going to hit y and enter and it's going to go ahead and go through the process of downloading and installing everything you're going to need to go ahead and get jellyfin up and running and now that it is installed we could go ahead and check to see if it's running with sudo service jellyfin status hit enter and we can see that the current service is active now if it does not say active what you could do is change status to start hit enter oh hit enter and it should be started up for you additionally you could use the system ctl command if you'd like to but that's really just a matter of preference and now that we know we have jellyfin up and running we're actually going to go to the web browser to continue the installation and get this set up and running so you can see this page that i was just on to actually input those commands again this will be linked down below with all the different distributions that you go ahead and install this on generally i just like ubuntu server because i'm so used to it but it really doesn't matter what you run this on so to begin the actual installation through our web portal you're going to want to go to the ip address that you sshed into whether that be local or external but right here we're going to want to make sure we travel to the proper port so i'm going to go like that and do 80 96 hit enter and that's going to take us to this welcome to jellyfin page from here if you want to you have a little quick start guide my preferred my favorite language is english so i'm going to go next here we're going to go to tell us about yourself this is basically your administration account you can also log into this account to view media and later on we could go ahead and create additional accounts but this is going to be your main account so for me i'm just going to go with my name which is brandon i'm going to give it a super secure and complicated password put that in again and then we're going to go next here we can go ahead and save this if we would like to and here we can go ahead and set up media libraries for now i'm actually going to skip this we're going to get way deep into this a little bit later so let's go next so preferred made a data language i'm going to go english united states now metadata is really important this is one of the reasons i really like jellyfin it handles this very well this is basically your movie and show titles your season names things like that will be used with the made data and it will automatically pull from whatever sources you prefer so we'll go next and here is your remote access i recommend keeping this box checked because it will block all remote connections if you do uncheck this you're going to want to log into your jellyfin server on your roku tv on your android tv whatever platform you happen to use and this option right here will actually allow you to access your jellyfin server from an external network with automatic port forwarding depending on your router this will be handled automatically if you have an older router chances are this might not work but it's worth giving it a check and seeing if it will work unless if you just simply do not want external access to your media so we'll go next and we're done so i'm going to go ahead and click finish i'm going to go ahead and log into it hit sign in and here is our jellyfin server there's nothing here yet because we have not set up any libraries so now that we have everything set up and we could go ahead and go to the website connect to our server instance what we're going to go ahead and do now is actually set up some libraries and actually get some media onto our server but before we actually create the library we're going to want to talk about the directory layouts and the name of our files i'm going to link to this down below which this is basically what i'm going to be going over right now and to do this what we're actually going to do is take a look at my backup drive right here we are in my media server backup folder i'm going to make everything a little bit bigger so you can see it better and this is basically how you're going to want to format things this is the main directory that i just copy and pasted over you see i have movies music and tv shows i'm not going to really be talking about music i'm going to be focusing on movies and tv shows in the movies folder i have two more directories one is adults and one is kids me i like to separate this out in jellyfin and you'll see a little bit what i'm talking about once we actually start organizing our libraries but for me since i have kids in the house it's easier to have the kids directories on top of the server or on top of the list of media so they can access that easily but for example if i go into adults here you can see the movies we have and all of them follow the same formatting you have the name of the movie followed by the date or the year of the movie release in parentheses and this is generally the format you're going to want to follow for movies and this is the easiest way jellyfin is going to go ahead and pull that made a data so you could have the proper pictures cover art things like that such as over here this catch me if you can you can see it's a film poster this is how it's going to actually display on the server and that's because it's properly titled now if i go back and i go into the media server backup and i go over to tv shows you can see i kind of have the same format here now it's not completely picky if you go and download media however you want to get it an example of this is a spongebob squarepants you're going to want to have the name of the show and within that folder you're going to want to have seasons so you see i have season one through eight if i open up season one you can see this technically isn't how jellyfin prefers it but it was still able to recognize it so you see it's 113 for season one episode 13 and if i scroll down here you can see these are a little bit different it managed to pull all this and recognize it so instead of having to go through and rename everything however you have your media i recommend throwing it in there syncing it up and see if it pulls everything correctly and if it doesn't you're gonna have to rename it to jelly fins preference and an example of that is if i go into the adult shows and go in deadwood for example and let's say season one you can see the formatting of this is s01e01 so season one episode one so this is how jellyfin prefers it and if you do it this way chances are you're gonna have no issue having jellyfin pull the episode names descriptions actors and all that properly so with that what we're gonna do is open up filezilla i found filezilla over the years to be the absolute best application for moving files in between servers in between computers whatever it may be and to go ahead and actually connect to our jellyfin server you're going to want to do sftp dot dot forward slash forward slash your username at your ip address mine's 192.168.0.66 in username you're going to want to input your username again input your password for the server you're going to ignore port and hit quit connect when you do that you may see this if this is your first time connecting to it it's our server so we're going to go ahead and trust it hit ok and now we are in our home directory and this is where we're actually going to go ahead and make our first library later on in this video we're going to talk about connecting other drives and connecting libraries to different hard drives on your computer but for now we're going to create a simple library in the home directory of this machine so for example i'm just going to create a directory i'm going to call this media hit enter and within this media directory i'm going to make two more i'm going to make the movies directory as well as the shows directory so let's type shows in there we go and you can kind of set this up however you want for example i have the kids and adults within each of these directories but for this example i'm just going to kind of leave this as is so let's go ahead and put a couple movies in here just so we can load it up let's say let's do back to the future and these are two good examples let's go ahead and drag those into my movies directory and while that moves let's go ahead and add a show so let's go ahead and back this up go under uh we'll back it up one more time let's go under tv shows let's go kids and let's say we want tom and jerry tails so let's drag that over to our shows and now we're going to go ahead and patiently wait for all of our data to transfer all right now we have a couple different directories in here that we can actually link this to so what we're going to do is open our web browser back up and go over to our jellyfin server says nothing here would you like to create one if we click on that it will take us to our libraries but just for habit let's go ahead and hit this little hamburger menu and go under our admin dashboard here we have a whole bunch of different options feel free to explore this as you see fit this is users general playback a whole bunch of things but our focus is going to be on libraries so here we go ahead and add a media library content type let's start with our movies and we'll keep the display name as movies now for folders this is where we're going to want to point it to our directory so we're going to go root then we're going to go home my username media movies if you have something like a nas set up in your home network you could go ahead and use the shared network folder chances are if you have a nas already set up you know how to use this so that is a wonderful option that you could do right there so from here let's go and hit ok and now here we have some library settings so we're going to want to select our preferred download language this is all the metadata and everything that it's going to download i'm going to go ahead and select english and now we're going to go and select my country it is united states so i'm going to go ahead and select that and here we have prefer embedded titles over file names luckily most of these options have these little descriptions under them so that will tell you exactly what's going on so you can enable or disable that if you'd like to generally i keep that off because the metadata downloaders work pretty good we have real-time monitoring here so if anything changes into your server so if you add a movie if you delete a movie if you change something around it will monitor that in real time and go ahead and do those changes for you generally i keep that enabled here under movie made of data downloaders i also keep this the same the movie db is pretty good everything that i've gotten it from it has been fine if you hit the drop down you can go ahead and change the order preference of these if you do prefer the open movie database but i'm going to keep that the same here we have automatically refresh you can set that if you'd like to i set never because i always end up manually doing this but you could have it reset every once in a while if you would like to metadata meta data savers this will save nfo files if you're interested i am not here is the movie image fetchers i recommend keeping this the same it does pretty good one thing in a future or the next part of this jellyfin server guides we're going to go over plug-ins and using fan art and things like this but for now we're going to keep all this the same if you want to you could go over to fetcher settings in which you could set limits for downloads and the sizes and all that so we're going to go back another option here is you could actually save the artwork into your media folder so that is an option if you'd like to here we have chapter images if you're doing this on a low spec machine i would not recommend doing this but this media pc i think can handle it so i'm going to enable chapter image extraction and this will actually pull screenshots from your media to use as those chapter images that you'd expect unlike a dvd for example and here we have extract chapter images during library scan so you could set that if you'd like to so it will do this every single time you scan your library i generally keep this disabled so now if we go and hit ok we have our movies library and i'm going to quickly add our shows one since i kind of ran through everything so we're going to keep this as shows we're going to go over into our home directory under my username media shows ok one thing i will note if you actually keep a lot of this stuff blank it will just pull the defaults for your default settings for your server so i'm going to keep that blank i'm going to keep all this as is i'm going to keep that as is i'm going to keep this as never i'm gonna keep the image fetchers and you see screen grabber right there which for shows a lot of times it ends up using this if the shows are kinda not super popular and i'm gonna go ahead and do this chapter image extraction so from here going to hit ok and now it is adding my shows and you can see right there under movies it's already importing some data but that isn't something i added so we're going to go ahead and check out to see what the problem is and to do that we could go over to home under movies it looks like i grabbed the wrong movie granted is a fantastic movie let's check this out real quick let's see what i did here under movies yeah we have dead with the movie i meant to grab something else but this is a fantastic movie so so we'll we'll deal with it so let's jump back over to our firefox browser and you can see it automatically pulling that data in it looks absolutely phenomenal under latest shows if i go ahead and open this up you can see it pulling the seasons properly it's showing the cast and crew and then if i open up season one for example it's still pulling all these descriptions and everything but you can see it pulling everything somewhat properly and i scroll up here you can see that this title is proper but this really isn't and that's probably because the naming schemes aren't correct so let's go ahead and check that as well so if we go under shows tom and jerry season one yep it's using that one if i wanted to make sure that was perfect i could go through and rename all this but this is just a kids show with a lot of different titles so i wasn't really too worried about that now if you're anything like me chances are you have terabytes of media that you want to be able to have accessible at any given moment and for that you're probably going to want to go ahead and add some additional drives you're not going to want to just use that home directory to store all your media and there's some extra things we need to do we need to set up those directories we need to mount them properly make it so they automatically mount and change some permissions so let's go ahead and do that right now and to do this we're going to be adding the fs tab file so we can have it automatically mount on boot now on this server that i'm running right now to do this tutorial i have a 256 gigabyte hard drive that we went ahead and added that library in originally and for me that is not enough that is going to fill up very quick so what i did is i went ahead and plugged in a 2 terabyte external ssd now usually you're going to want to stick with internal disks but i'm using this 2 terabyte because that's all i have one thing i will note doing it this method with the fs tab if i went ahead and unplugged this after doing what we're about to do and tried to boot our system it would return an error so that's just a little uh precaution when using anything like an external hard drive or usb stick or anything like that and to actually do this i'm going to have this linked down below this is actually an article i wrote but to quickly cover this what we're going to want to do is pull the uuid of the drive that we're going to want to auto mount which it's going to be this one right here to get this information pulled up i just ran sudo fdisk dash l and here it will give you the information on your drives i know for sure this is my boot drive and you can kind of tell that under the device that has the partitions and you can see this is the linux file system with the boot records on it that's kind of how i know and then if i go under here this gives me extreme ssd so i am confident that this is what i want to set up a new auto mount for so after i typed the fdisk l what i'm going to keep note of is this right here this is sdb that is the drive so we're going to type sudo blk id and that's going to give us the uf or the uuid numbers for our disks so what i'm going to do actually real quick is just copy this right here give that a copy because this is our actual information for that external ssd because it's the one following the sdb that we just looked at up here and once we have that and we have it copied we're going to want to make the directory that this drive is automatically going to mount to so i'm just going to go ahead and cd into our route and let's cd into the media folder this is where we're going to keep our mount point for this drive so what i'm going to do is actually make a new folder which is going to be the mount point so it's a sudo mkdr or dir and we're going to call this ssd hit enter and now if i ls we should have that right there ssd so now what we're going to want to do is actually edit that fstab file so i'm going to go sudo nano ect dash fs tab and hit enter now right here depending on the system you're on this might be formatted a little bit differently for example if i pull this and again this is the actual tutorial i'm going to link you can see right here it starts with uuid equals and then that this is a little bit different on this ubuntu server but it's pretty easy to figure out just for reference what i'm going to do is paste in what we copied earlier and i'm going to go ahead and add this and we can basically just copy what this says right here so we're going to go dash dev dash disk dash by dash uuid and then we're going to put in the actual uuid which is right here so i'm going to copy this from the sdb drive give that a copy give that a paste and now right here you're going to want to tab and type in the proper directory we just created so that was under media dash ssd you're going to want to hit tab again go e t or e x t 4 or whatever the actual type is make sure it's one that's compatible with the linux obviously and then we're gonna go tab and we're gonna type in defaults just like that and now we're gonna go tab 0 tab 0. and if you're more interested in what this is you could go ahead and check out that link but now what i'm going to do is actually get rid of this reference i went ahead and added so let's get rid of that and now we could go ahead and save out our drive so control or save out our file control o enter exit out and now what we're going to want to do is do a sudo mount dash a and hit enter and we shouldn't get any errors all right so everything it seems to have worked okay and we can actually check this by going back over to filezilla here and let's travel to that directory so if i go up here and go to my root directory we could then go over to media ssd and you can see i already have some media in there now one thing you're going to want to do i already have these permissions set up properly but just in case your server might not be able to access this because it is in that root directory so if i go ahead and highlight everything or actually let's just highlight these because this is what's important here right click we're going to go file permissions and you're going to want to make sure that it has owner permissions group permissions and at least read write public permissions i can go ahead and add it right which this should allow me to actually manipulate the media deleted and all that through jellyfin hit ok and now those permissions are set up properly if i want to just to be real safe i could do the same thing over here go file permissions just go 777 okay and now those have the proper permissions so now what we can do let's go ahead and minimize this and open up our web browser again so let's pull this in over here and then if we go back to our jellyfin server instance let's go back let's go under our dashboard panel or our admin panel go over to libraries and let's add a new one so first things first actually i'm going to go ahead and rename this shows so just do rename and this is you could do this for just about anything i'm going to call this kids shows hit enter because we're going to add a adults shows library so let's go ahead go content types shows display name shows is fine now folders we're going to go to that new thing we just created it's suggesting it right there but we go to the root directory go down to media ssd and here is that external drive so we're going to add shows and hit ok and i'm going to keep all this at default just for now actually let's go ahead and add that hit ok and now it's going to begin importing that shows library you can see the little progress bar there if i go over to my home page you can see shows it's still importing all the images and all the proper data but if i open it up you can see it's starting to load up just about everything now in the beginning of this video i mentioned that you could use an old laptop to do this and basically everything that we did in this video you could do on that laptop but there's one little tip that i'm quickly going to run over that may be helpful for actually setting up a laptop as a server and this can work with any server instance basically we're going to make it so we can shut the screen of the laptop without it actually uh getting suspended or turning off so actually disabling suspension when you close a laptop lid is pretty easy what we're going to do is go sudo nano etc systemd login d dot config or conf hit enter and when you're in this directory what we're going to want to do is uncomment some things so we're going to want to go handle suspend key so let's go down there is handle suspend key we're going to uncheck that or uncomment that we're going to want to go to handle lid switch uncomment that and then we're going to want to go to handle switch lid docked uncomment that and then we're going to want to change these to ignore so ignore just like that control o enter to save exit out and now we're going to want to do is just restart our systemd with the system ctl restart command just like this so hit enter and now we are good to go if this were to have actually been a laptop and i close the lid at this point it will not suspend our server so you now have jellyfin you now have access to all your media you could go ahead log into this on a roku tv i have both a roku and android tv set up where i access this from and overall the experience has been absolutely phenomenal so make sure you're subscribed you ring that bell because hopefully within the next week or two we are going to be doing part two where we go over additional plugins some customization of the theming and everything like that as well as maybe some additional tips and tricks when it comes to the actual media in your libraries with all that said i would love to thank my youtube members and patreon supporters we have mitchell valentino phil mack teemo anthony and kyle you guys are some of my highest your patreon supporters and i do thank you very much for that as well as all the other techie and techie plus members if you're interested you can hit the join button down below or go to the link in the description to go over to patreon otherwise the simple like of this video and subscribing is good enough for me with all that said i hope you all have a absolutely beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 316,369

Keywords: linux, media server, home media, netflix, jellyfin, plex, emby

Id: eJvQKLVrmU8

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021