Jellyfin

Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached.

Installing & Initial Configuration & Setup

To get up and running with Jellyfin, add the packages pkgs.jellyfin pkgs.jellyfin-web & pkgs.jellyfin-ffmpeg to your `configuration.nix` file as shown below.

{
  services.jellyfin.enable = true;
  environment.systemPackages = [
    pkgs.jellyfin
    pkgs.jellyfin-web
    pkgs.jellyfin-ffmpeg
  ];
}

If you want more advanced configuration, use something like what's shown below and see the docs for more configuration options

{
  services.jellyfin = {
    enable = true;
    openFirewall = true;
  };
}

Once you have included the correct packages to be installed, and enabled and configured Jellyfin to your liking, then rebuild your system for changes to take effect.

$ sudo nixos-rebuild switch

After the rebuild is complete Jellyfin should be running, verify that it is with the following command.

$ sudo systemctl status jellyfin

If Jellyfin is not running, you should be able to start it by simply running jellyfin in your terminal.

$ jellyfin

Finally. After you've verified that Jellyfin is running, you can start the configuration process.

• The Jellyfin server should be running on port 8096.
• Go to http://localhost:8096 if you are setting this up on your primary computer or want to test your build locally.
• If you're logging into a remote server, replace localhost with the IP address of the server.

Allow Jellyfin to read external drives

You might encounter permission issues when you try to access external drives if you haven't configured anything else with the server yet. If you haven't explicitly set up a mounting configuration for your drives and instead have your desktop environment (e.g., GNOME or KDE) automatically mount it when you try accessing it via their file explorers, Jellyfin won't be able to access the drive. This is because the desktop environment mounts it to your user, while Jellyfin uses by default the "jellyfin" user.

The easiest way to allow it to see these external drives mounted is to change the service's user. Here is an example:

  services.jellyfin = {
    enable = true;
    openFirewall = true;
    user="yourusername";
  };

If you have changed the user option after you have already installed Jellyfin, you have to change the permissions of the folder /var/lib/jellyfin via chown to the user you set it to by doing this:

  sudo chown -R /var/lib/jellyfin

The alternative to this is to explicitly mount the drives via Filesystems, but takes more effort to set up and requires every new drive you want Jellyfin to see to be explicitly declared, but allows more control in what Jellyfin is allowed to see.

Hardware Transcoding

In most cases you want to make most of your hardware. Modern boards often come with Hardware Accelerators, all you need to do is enable it!

Source: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.html

VAAPI and Intel QSV

VAAPI and QSV is often available on platforms with Intel GPUs but need their corresponding packages in hardware.opengl.extraPackages.

{ pkgs, lib,config, ... }:
{
  # 1. enable vaapi on OS-level
  nixpkgs.config.packageOverrides = pkgs: {
    vaapiIntel = pkgs.vaapiIntel.override { enableHybridCodec = true; };
  };
  hardware.opengl = {
    enable = true;
    extraPackages = with pkgs; [
      intel-media-driver
      intel-vaapi-driver # previously vaapiIntel
      vaapiVdpau
      libvdpau-va-gl
      intel-compute-runtime # OpenCL filter support (hardware tonemapping and subtitle burn-in)
      vpl-gpu-rt # QSV on 11th gen or newer
      intel-media-sdk # QSV up to 11th gen
    ];
  };

  # 2. do not forget to enable jellyfin
  services.jellyfin.enable = true;
}

Related: Accelerated_Video_Playback Intel_Graphics