Selfhosted @lemmy.world Willdrick @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

Add HTPC capabilities to home server

My server is a regular pc hidden away behind the tv console, it's running ubuntu server and most services run inside docker.

One of the most used services is Jellyfin. It works reliably on all PCs but it's a mess on my samsung tv running tizen. I enabled developer mode and built jellyfin app for it, but depending on the codec or size, it'll buffer or skip audio and its getting really annoying.

How would you go about adding a jellyfin frontend (jellyfin media player) on the server itself, since I could plug in a 2m HDMI cable for video output?

EDIT: I should probably explain a bit better. The server has a Ryzen 3 3200G with integrated graphics, so video output itself would be trivial (just plug an HDMI cable to the motherboard output). Right now if I plug it in, I get a TTY since it's a server distro not intended to have a GUI. My question was more along the lines of how to set up the lightest graphical session to run jellyfin media player (probably via flatpak so it's independent of the OS environment).

In general it would be somewhat easy to set up a bare X/Wayland session and just launch the program, but the part I forsee being troublesome is the "newer" tech: surround sound (via e-arc) 4k and HDR. Right now, whenever I use the jellyfin tizen app, if it "likes" the video file (transcoding is disabled due to weak cpu) it works perfectly, 4k, HDR, 5.1... I don't have much of a budget or even space to build a secondary HTPC, although I do have a spare Rpi 3b... worst case scenario I could try something like OSMC, but I'd rather have a consistent UX (Jellyfin as the frontend for everything)

11 comments

Via KODI maybe?
Firefox and Jellyfin webui.

Settings >> Display >> Display Mode >> TV

Then get a small Bluetooth remote that has arrow keys, enter, backspace, and escape.
i also would like a solution that doesn't require a dedicated GPU

for security issues i don't really like to give direct access to the whole server just to watch movies (yes, i could create a limited user on a limited group that can access the movies directory and nothing else, but then because i'm not a linux guru....)

i'd like to have a VM running on the integrated GPU
- setting up a graphical session with a non-root user and sandboxing Jellyfin media player would be relatively easily, for example using only flatpak, you could sandbox it so it only has access to your media path.
- Proxmox would help. It's great for running VMs and managing hardware
  
  It's been over a year and a half since I built this setup, and to this day I kick myself for not building everything on top of proxmox. That being said, I'm on a rather limited hardware, so I don't know how much better would be to migrate to it (R3 3200G, 6gb of ram)
  
  i tried but i had no luck in reassigning the igpu to the vm. It only works with a dedicated one :(
- Cleanest is to just separate the server from the client.

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