Experiences with Jellyfin

 I've been running Jellyfin for a while now - I tried Plex but it didn't gel for me. Jellyfin was pretty straightforward and just seemed to work really easily. So here's their website: https://jellyfin.org/ 

There are a few different ways to run Jellyfin - install it on a system running on bare metal, or a virtual machine, or even in a container (either a Proxmox LXC or a docker container). I messed around with it a bit, and decided to take a straightforward route - install it onto a virtual Ubuntu Server running on one of my Proxmox servers. 

The set up was pretty straightforward - there's some good details here: https://jellyfin.org/downloads/server and it was easy to set up the repositories and get the thing going. The initial configuration is fairly simple, and for me it required a few components:

• a server to run Jellyfin
• a link of some type to where all my media (TV and Movies) live

I have a NAS with plenty of disk space so I set up an NFS link and hooked the two servers up together. This was pretty easy, and for this install, I gave Jellyfin read/write access to the different directories - so if Jellyfin was downloading images or metadata I had a chance to keep it all neat and tidy together. The security is simple, but reasonably OK - it won't keep anyone determined out, but it's not critical data.

So after the initial install and set up of Jellyfin - there are some great guides out there so it's worth finding one and getting into it - I added the TV and Movie folders to Jellyfin and kicked off the initial scan. There's a fair bit in those folders - I've spent a small fortune on DVDs and digital media over the last few years, so this took a while to complete. Then there was the work to go through and make sure that the Movies were properly identied. Gran Turino never seems to be detected properly - but it's reasonably straightforward to fix it up. The data flows between servers got fairly intense for a while but eventually settled down.

There are some tuning options in Jellyfin - go to the three lines in the top left, and then Dashboard:

Plenty of things to touch and play with in there :-) It's worth reading through some of the documentation to make sure you pick the best options. I typically will enable a few extra plugins:

These are to get the box sets of TV series right, and the images / identifiers correct for files. Choose your own adventure. 

I had been watching Jellyfin via iPad or via a web browser, and it wasn't until I was poking around a bit that I found an app for the Apple TV - Swiftfin! This was a game changer in our house - we had used a media PC for all our TV and movie watching and now we could just use the Apple TV which is great! 

With a relatively slow internet connection (25/5Mbps) I had been downloading only low res stuff - otherwise it took forever to get and wasn't great for fast movie viewing. This was fine - I was running Jellyfin on a server with Xeon 4114 Silver processors - which are great for compute and server stuff and absolutely crap for video decoding. As the Australian NBN network was upgraded and I managed to get a fiber upgrade to 100/20 speeds and then, almost unbelievably a free upgrade to 500/50 meant all of a sudden those high res, much nicer looking downloads were in my reach! So excitement!

But with great speeds (and resolutions) come great encoding and decoding requirements. Dual Xeon processors don't cut it (especially when they are server CPUs) so I have a little problem - the load on the CPUs is huge and it takes a long time to sort out the video to deliver it. To fix this, I lashed out and picked up an Nvidia Tesla P4 server GPU - and wow what an impact this has made. The load on the CPUs has dropped to a negligible level and the responsiveness of the video playback is excellent - virtually real time which is fantastic!

Settings look like this (so I have a record if Jellyfin dies):

It's really worth the $130AUD that I spent on it - gotta love second hand gear off eBay! Really worth it. 

I've had very little trouble with Jellyfin - it's been a solid bit of software to work with. If you combine with the *ARR servers, then it becomes a thing of great beauty - but more on that later!

Review: Lenovo Legion 5i Gaming Laptop

 I picked up a Legion 5i at Officeworks on special before the end of the financial year here in Australia, and now that I've messed around with it for three months, I wanted to write something nice. Yes, nice - it's been a really lovely laptop to use. First of all it looks like this:

And my model has the following specs:

• 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13650HX (2.60GHz) - 14 cores!
• 16GB of RAM
• 500GB SSD
• NVidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU

It cost me about $1300 AUD - it was marked down from $1800 and then had a further 5% reduction because it had been returned - the purchaser quote "didn't like the operating system", because there are a lot of preinstalled options to Windows 11 these days. At any rate, I picked it up for a song - potentially because it's a previous model - but who cares? It's got a 16" screen that supports 2560x1600 and it's really lovely to behold. The backlit keyboard with it's cascading light show is a nice touch too. 

From a use case perspective, I've been using this laptop for gaming, regular work stuff, a bit of Ollama AI work and movies. I've played Baldur's Gate 3 and Fortnite on it most extensively and mostly used the Mistral model when using local AI. The games have been snappy and great, with lots of effects on and no real slowness which has been nice, and the AI has worked fairly quickly. The limitations of what you can do on an RTX4050 with 6GB of RAM are well known. It's nice to have a machine that can actually drive the thing though and I've had some real fun. It's important to note that like most Lenovo laptops, the keyboard is great to use for extended typing - and with extra little bumps on important keys (not just your home keys, but also the home keys for gaming) it's been pleasant to use - far more so than the Dell I use for work, which has an overly soft key press and much poorer tactile response. 

The newer versions have i9 processors and a better GPU but appear to have much the same form and appearance. I'm very happy with it - the Windows 11 install doesn't have too much bloat so that's a good thing, and the Lenovo update system works pretty well as usual. Altogether I can recommend this laptop - it you want a nice mid-range gaming machine, or a big solid work laptop that can give you pretty much a desktop replacement with it's big monitor. Although I purchased it as a tax deduction and I've used it for a *lot* of work related activities (particularly stuffing around with locally hosted AI), I've been pleased with it's gaming capabilities too - perfect for the lad and I to get into a bit of FPS action. 

Further adventures with Immich - external access

 Astute readers and users of this software will note that when self-hosting access is naturally limited to whatever you've got on your personal, home network. While this is great, I'd like to still back my photos up to Immich when I'm out and about.

I use Cloudflare tunnels for access to other handy bits of software like The Hive (for digital forensics) and BookShelf (for documents etc). So setting up a Cloudflare tunnel for Immich seems like an easy thing to do. Except of course when it comes to authentication. You do not want to implement a tunnel without authentication and I really prefer to use Zero Trust wherever possible. I am a child of the X-Files after all, so trusting no-one is par for the course.

I found an excellent guide to help by Thomas Wilde on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4vVYFVWu5Q and this really got the party started. Configuring the service token and getting it into the Immich app is quite straightforward and Thomas explains it well.

I then changed the app to sync as soon as the phone is plugged into power and voila! It all works brilliantly. 

OK, so we've solved the external access trickiness, and that's great. Keeping up with the updates is a bit of a challenge - Immich is being *very* actively developed so there's frequent updates. I usually try to update the docker image about once a fortnight and that seems to be manageable cadence.

It's worked so well that I have now moved my wife and daughter's images across. My child takes many many photos so I'm working with her to understand that the crap ones really need to be deleted - I don't want gigabytes of crap everywhere.

And of course, I snapshot the server before upgrading via Proxmox and backup using my Proxmox backup server. A restore of my Immich server was quite successful after a poorly executed attempt to change some settings for another project - oops! Thankfully, it was quick and relatively straightforward to get back to where I was, with only 18 hours and no data lost.

I still recommend this excellent app - you will need to learn some docker and some general systems admin skills. I would not recommend opening it up to the world - and why would you when you can make use of Cloudflare tunnels, or failing that - Twingate which I discovered and have been playing a bit with - more on that later. Enjoy your computing!