Well, here goes nothing. Was doing my research into the various replacements for plex, and was considering emby, jellyfin, and kodi. I had reservations about all three for various reasons (as noted in this post). Well, okay, not a lot about concerns with Kodi, but only because I haven't had a lot of experience with kodi...
This week, I was reading through Vermaden's valuable news, and what shows up in the feed, but an article by jhx on the bsdcafe blog, on setting up Jellyfin on FreeBSD, and specifically in a jail. I figured I would give it a try once more to either get it working, or remove it from the list of possible replacements.
In my last attempt to get jellyfin to work, the problem I had was that it would not catalog any more than about 20 movies/tv shows/music/pictures, and then it went dumb. I would reboot the jail and it would grab one or two more, lather, rinse, repeat. Well, I followed the steps in the article, which were what I pretty much did the first time. I created the jail, and fortunately, I have an ansible role that will provision a jail or hardware host and prepare it for my network and ready to "splat down" software. There was one step on the page, a setting that I did not know about in the configuration:
allow.mlock 1
I added this to the configuration of the jail, installed jellyfin, and started the server. Went through the setup wizard, pointed to all of my media files, and let it go. Well, it has been collecting cache info and building it's database for a day now. I have been spot checking to see that it is actually doing something other than turning electricity into heat, and it actually appears to be adding information to the cache and the database, and it is also transcoding something, so I will just let it run and see how it turns out. I have multiple items listed on the page. So now it is a waiting game. I'll let it run to completion, and see how it turns out.
My only question right now is whether migrating it from the jail server I have it on now (i5-7500/4 cores with 32GB RAM) to my desktop, which also has the bastille jail manager configured on it, and has a Ryzen 7 5800/8 cores with 64GB of ram would speed the process of db/cache creation...
Update: 2025-12-04: Jellyfin appears to have completed building it's cache and database, and only has a low-level, and ongoing ffmpeg job out there that is doing transcoding. So now I am going and cleaning up some of the metadata, especially album covers and movie posters. But it looks like I am back in business...I guess now I will start collecting some TVPC hardware...
Hello, does your old Plex Jail and now your new Jellyfin Jail use your CPU's integrated GPU or just the CPU? For transcoding tasks? I don't have Plex or Jellyfin on BSD for that very reason, because I understand that they only use the CPU and not the integrated GPU, which is why I have it on a host with Debian.
Hi Matt, thanks for stopping by. I am not 100% sure, as I haven't gone into the weeds on the subject. If I'm honest, I have mainly been working at getting metadata set up now that everything has been imported. There was a low-level ffmpeg transcode job for the first couple of days that jellyfin was up, but even that has stopped running.
That being said, the hardware I am running it on is a jail on a Lenovo M710q Tiny server, which has an i5-7500 and no discrete GPU, so I figure on that kind of hardware, it is six in one hand and half a dozen in the other...
However, when you asked the question, I did a quick search, and there seems to be a discussion on reddit's r/ffmpeg that seems to say, at a glance, that "it depends on the codec."
I had considered standing up devuan in bhyve, but saw jhx's article and decided to keep it on the same OS as the rest of my infrastructure.