I’ve always wanted to take Jellyfin for a test drive and I have finally managed to get around to it.
Whilst spring-cleaning my VPS, I decided that I don’t really need it anymore. It was still humming along nicely; the contact expires towards the end of the year and so I though and thought. Then Jellyfin popped into my mind. Why not?
I test-installed it locally on a VM first and it was almost too easy. From install to up-and-running was about…5 minutes, if that. I installed it on my VPS and it is chugging away, available at a moments notice when I want to catch up on some episodes or have a movie night.
I must say, it works very well and I’m impressed so far. I’m not going to get into doing a review of Jellyfin here but I think why I like it so much is that it DOES NOT SHOW ANY BLOODY ADS! Also, none of that “We think you will like” crap on my TV screen. It might have the ability to show this (I can’t quite remember) but what I do remember is turning off some settings related to suggestions. To be frank, I rather like browsing through my own collection (which I added myself) and so mate, I know exactly what is available, thanks!
I’ve got about 6 months remaining on my VPS and will definitely be looking for a new home for Jellyfin. I have a couple of old laptops gathering dust somewhere and will likely install the server there. As I don’t need the server running 24/7, this will work for me; I can turn it on when I need it.
Media pools
As Jellyfin clients can only connect to one server at a time, I thought of a wonderful idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if a pool of shared media was available? Some decentralised pool of course, which is what this wonderful idea is. For example, I could share my library and Bob could share his and Alice, hers, and each of us connects to the one shared pool of media files. Pool “nodes” could drop in and out as-and-when but all clients keep pointing to the pool.
This is not to have a “watch together” movie night with friends - Jellyfin already does that. I’m talking about watching S01E07 from Bob’s drive whilst Bob is watching a movie from Alice’s drive and Alice is watching S07E23 from mine.
Searching online about how this can be done brought me to MergerFS. So, I’m not the first one to think of this! :-) The problem with this setup is the bottleneck single mount-point: It would need to run on something ultra-capable for those high-traffic days and nights.
But still, a cool idea. I wish it were possible to do easily and cheaply.