Installation
Are they easy to deploy?
Most of these projects are multi-platform and also support various architectures. Unless you have a peculiarly configured network setup, the default configuration option for each should suffice for most regular home users.
You’ll find Kodi in the software repositories of many distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian. Fedora users can similarly install it from the popular RPM Fusion repository. But if the project doesn’t provide a binary for your distribution, or you want to compile the latest edition on your own, the project uses
Cmake as its build system and provides specific instructions for various distributions such as Fedora, opensuse and so on.
Despite its ample documentation, novice Linux users would be best served by trying the project on Ubuntu, where the installation process requires little more than enabling the PPA repository and running the sudo apt install kodi command.
Gerbera, on the other hand, insists that you install it using your distribution’s software repositories. Its installation is thus a breeze on Ubuntu, Debian, opensuse, Arch, Gentoo and even Centos. While Fedora users can opt for the RPM available on https://pkgs.org, if your distribution isn’t listed you might consider deploying the official Docker image for a relatively painless deployment.
If you decide to compile it from source, be sure to read through the documentation, which provides a list of all the dependencies. Plex, too, similarly provides DEB and RPM binaries for installation, as well as a Docker image.
Like the others, Jellyfin provides easy instructions on installing on a variety of Linux distributions using software repositories. If you already have Plex or Emby installed on your machine, and want to try Jellyfin too, you’ll have to edit its /etc/jellyfin/ system.xml file to change the default port, as all these projects use the same by default. Jellyfin continues to report an error about the port number even after you change it, but everything runs as expected.
Instead of installable binaries, Universal Media Server ships a distribution-neutral compressed tarball. You’ll find an install.txt file within that lists all the requirements for the project, such as Jave JRE, Mediainfo, Mencoder and so on. You can install these using your distribution’s software repositories. After installing all the dependencies, you can launch UMS directly by executing the UMS.SH script. In this sense, it’s probably the easiest of the servers to install.