Stream films, TV and music
Jellyfin can cover almost all of your media streaming needs…
Once Jellyfin is set up, you’re taken to your home screen, which offers a variety of ways to view your media library: at the top are shortcuts to individual libraries, followed by the Next Up section, which helps you track your progress through TV shows by helpfully displaying partially played episodes as well as queuing up the next available episode for viewing. Beneath this you’ll see the latest additions to your libraries.
You’ll find plenty of on-screen aids to help you navigate even the largest libraries. At the top are a range of library views, from Suggestions to Genres. Look out, too, for Favorites – which lists any media you’ve marked by clicking the heart icon next to it – and Collections, which enables you to group movies by your choice of criteria, such as franchise or lead actor.
Below are three buttons, enabling you to change from the default poster-based view to show banners, lists or thumbs. Next to this is the A-Z button, enabling you to sort your library by different criteria, while the final button allows you to apply filters to the view, from features and genres to parental ratings and years.
When you select a specific movie, TV episode or other media, you’re whisked to its own page, where you’ll hopefully see a synopsis as well as a summary of the media’s audio and video type. If the media item contains a choice of video, audio or subtitles, look for drop-down menus enabling you to switch from the default choices before playing your movie.
If you’ve gone the extra mile to add supplements to your media library, such as featurettes or deleted scenes, you’ll find these here, too – embedded alongside the movie, or at season level with TV shows. See https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/ movies for more pointers on how to name and organise these in your libraries.
Fix metadata
As you browse your library, you’re likely to come across the odd series or movie that has been incorrectly identified. To fix this – plus make other metadatarelated changes – click the hamburger ( ) button in the top-left corner of the screen to slide out the main Jellyfin menu and choose Metadata under Admin.
The Metadata Manager reveals an Explorer-like view of your media by folder. Drill down to a movie title, or parent folder for a TV show, and you’ll see its metadata in the right-hand pane. You can manually edit this if you wish, but if you’re trying to fix an incorrect match, a quicker method is to click the vertical ellipsis button next to Save and choose Identify.
This brings up a search tool – you can search by title and/or year (which should resolve most issues where an identically titled show or movie from a different year has been selected), but if this doesn’t yield a result, go online to www.imdb.com or http://thetvdb.com to manually locate your show and grab its ID. Enter this into the relevant search field and you’re guaranteed to get the correct match when you click Search.
Manage your server
To configure your server, open the main menu and choose Dashboard under Admin. There are four main sections: Server, Devices, Live TV and Advanced, with Dashboard at the top. It provides a handy overview of recent changes, which devices are connected and what content is streaming – and who’s streaming it.
Beneath this, the General section enables you to change your server name and preferred language, followed by Users. If you’re planning on sharing access
to Jellyfin with other users – both locally and remotely – set up individual accounts for each person with their own custom access to your libraries. In return they gain their own personalised user experience, including their own Up Next deck. Simply click + to set up your first user: assign them a name and password, and choose what libraries to give them access to. Click Save.
Once a user is created, you gain access to four tabs of settings: Profile, Access, Parental Control and Password. Under Profile, you’ll see options for enabling or disabling remote streaming, management of the server and access to specific features, such as Live TV, SyncPlay and media downloading. Access is where you manage their access to both libraries and from specific devices, while Parental Control gives you handy control over children’s access to content on the server, with options for setting a minimum parental rating, plus limiting access by day and time. Use the Password tab to assign a new password or add a PIN code for easier access. Click Save when you’re done.
Libraries is – of course – where you go to manage existing libraries, plus add new ones (the process is identical to that in the first-run wizard). The final setting under Server is Playback. Available options here include whether to use hardware acceleration for transcoding if supported – remember, there may be a price to pay in terms of image quality, so experiment with toggling it on or off. You’ll also find advanced conversion settings for transcoding to x264/x265 – Handbrake users should recognise most of these options, and this flexibility is something that sets Jellyfin apart from other media servers, such as Plex.
If you’re planning to access your server remotely (or share it with others), you need to configure Jellyfin
accordingly. While its Advanced > Networking section enables you to do this manually, we recommend setting things up through a reverse proxy, such as Nginx Proxy Manager (which we featured in LXF306).
First, configure Jellyfin – because the reverse proxy is doing all the hard work, all you need to do is ensure Allow Remote Connections To This Server and Enable IP4 are both ticked under Advanced > Networking.
Now get yourself a suitable domain, subdomain or free dynamic domain, as outlined in the Nginx Proxy Manager tutorial, make sure it’s pointing to your public
IP address (as revealed at www.whatsmyip.com) and then click Add Proxy Host in the Nginx web interface.
Enter your domain name, leave Scheme set to http and set the Forward Hostname/IP to your server’s IP address and the Forward Port to 8096. Switch on Block Common Exploits before selecting the SSL tab. When setting up your free SSL certificate, don’t forget to flick the Force SSL switch on to ensure all connections from outside your network to the server are secure.
Manage playback
If you’re planning to allow remote access to your server, you also need to be mindful of the speed of your internet connection. Benchmark your connection using a website such as Speedtest (www.speedtest. net). You need to compare your connection’s upload speeds with the typical bitrates required to stream content to determine how many remote streams your connection can handle simultaneously.
Once done, ration your available bandwidth under Playback > Streaming. Here you can set a per-stream bitrate limit – any media with higher bitrates is transcoded to fit whatever limit you set, so bear this in mind if you’re streaming from a low-powered device, and remember that offloading transcoding to the GPU under Playback > Transcoding enables you to handle many more streams simultaneously, albeit with a slight hit to streaming quality.