Installing and using Jellyfin without root (programming.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by Hammerheart@programming.dev to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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?

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[-] helpimnotdrowning@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 5 months ago

The docs say jellyfin-ffmpeg is only needed on Debian distros, like Debian itself or Ubuntu, other distros like Fedora should be able to use their respective ffmpeg packages. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/linux#ffmpeg-installation

Is there a reason you can't have root on your VPS? Maybe you could ask to have Jellyfin and ffmpeg installed by an admin?

If your willing to try it, you could unpack the .deb file with dpkg -x <jellyfin-ffmpeg-for-your-distro.deb> <unpack dir> and stick the resulting directory (directories?) in Jellyfin's PATH, but I've never tried this myself and I don't know how well this could work.