Installing and using Jellyfin without root

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/14680192

I have a VPS, but no root access so I can't use apt, or even read a lot of the system files. I would like to get jellyfin (or any media server, really) running on it. Jellyfin has a portable installation option, so I followed the instructions in the docs to install it from the .tar.gz.

But it says I have to install ffmpeg-jellyfin, and I can't find a portable installation of that. My VPS already has ffmpeg installed on it. Will jellyfin work if I just point it to that instead? Or, how can I go about installing ffmpeg-jellyfin without root access?