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Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a Free Software Media System that puts you in control of managing and streaming your media. It is an alternative to the proprietary Emby and Plex, to provide media from a dedicated server to end-user devices via multiple apps. Jellyfin is descended from Emby's 3.5.2 release and ported to the .NET Core framework to enable full cross-platform support. There are no strings attached, no premium licenses or features, and no hidden agendas: just a team who want to build something better and work together to achieve it.

Clients⚑

Jellyfin Desktop⚑

Installation⚑

  • Download the latest deb package from the releases page
  • Install the dependencies
  • Run dpkg -i

If you're on a TV you may want to enable the TV mode so that the remote keys work as expected. The play/pause/next/prev won't work until this issue is solved, but it's not that bad to use the "Ok" and then navigate with the arrow keys.

Jellycon⚑

JellyCon is a lightweight Kodi add-on that lets you browse and play media files directly from your Jellyfin server within the Kodi interface. It can be thought of as a thin frontend for a Jellyfin server.

It's not very pleasant to use though.

Installation⚑

  • Add the Jellyfin kodi addon repository 
    wget https://kodi.jellyfin.org/repository.jellyfin.kodi.zip
  • Open Kodi, go to the settings menu, and navigate to "Add-on Browser"
  • Select "Install from Zip File"
  • From within Kodi, navigate to "Add-on Browser"
  • Select "Install from Repository"
  • Choose "Kodi Jellyfin Add-ons", followed by "Video Add-ons"
  • Select the JellyCon add-on and choose install

Missing features⚑

  • Hide movie or tv show from my gallery: Tracked by these feature requests 1 and 2

Troubleshooting⚑

Forgot Password. Please try again within your home network to initiate the password reset process.⚑

If you're an external jellyfin user you can't reset your password unless you are part of the LAN. This is done because the reset password process is simple and insecure.

If you don't care about that and still think that the internet is a happy and safe place here and here are some instructions on how to bypass the security measure.

For more information also read 1 and 2.

Transcode files are cleared frequently⚑

By default they are cleared each day. If you want to keep them you can go to Admin/Scheduled Tasks/Clean Transcode Directory and remove the scheduled task.

Deceptive site ahead⚑

It seems that Google is marking the domains that host Jellyfin as deceptive. If it happens to you, your users won't be able to access your instance with Firefox, Chrome nor the Android app. Nice uh? It's kind of scary how google is able to control who can access what in the internet without you signing for it.

If you search the problem online they suggest that you log in with your google account into the Search Console and see the reasons behind it. Many people did this and reported in the issue that they didn't get any useful information through this process. It's a privacy violation though, as now google is able to tie your identity (as your google account is linked to your phone number) with your Jellyfin domain. Completely disgusting.

To solve this issue you need to file a case with google and wait for them to unban you. It's like asking them for permission so that they let your users access your system. The disgust levels keep on growing. Don't waste your time being creative in the Comments of the request either, it looks like they don't even read them.

The problem is that until the people from Jellyfin finds a solution, after following this ugly process, you may be flagged again any time in the future (ranging from days to months).

A mitigation of the problem is to have an alternative domain that your users can use (for example in duckdns.org). You may be lucky that google doesn't block both domains at the same time.

For more information follow the Jellyfin issue or the Jellyfin reddit thread.

Corrupt: SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException: database disk image is malformed⚑

If your server log file shows SQLite errors like the following example your jellyfin.db file needs attention.

'SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException'

Typical causes of this are sudden and abrupt terminations of the Emby server process, such as a power loss, operating system crash, force killing the server process, etc.

Solutions to Try in This Order⚑

Remove Database Locks⚑
  1. Shutdown Jellyfin
  2. Navigate to the folder containing your database file
  3. Delete library.db-shm and library.db-wal
  4. Restart Jellyfin

Check you server log for SQLite errors and only continue to the next step if needed.

Check Database Integrity and Recover Database⚑

This step will require the use of a SQLite editor, I recommend litecli installable with pip.

Run Integrity Check⚑

Open the library.db database and run the following SQL command:

PRAGMA integrity_check

This should return an integrity_check back of OK with no errors reported. If errors are reported we need to recover the database.

Recover library.db⚑

What we need to do is:

  • Dump all data from the database to a text file and then reload this back to another freshly created database. Run the following command line:
sqlite3 library.db ".recover" | sqlite3 library-recovered.db

sqlite3 can be installed with apt-get install sqlite3.

  • We will now check the integrity of our recovered database (as above) using:
sqlite3 library-recovered.db "PRAGMA integrity_check"

This should return an integrity_check back of "OK" with no errors reported. If errors are reported please report this in the jellyfin issues before proceeding to Reset the Library Database. If OK and no errors are reported continue with the next step.

  • Make a copy of both library.db and library-recovered.db
mkdir broken-dbs
cp library* broken-dbs
  • Rename library.db to library.old
mv library.db library.old
  • Rename library-recoved.db to library.db
mv library-recovered.db library.db
  • Restart Jellyfin Server
service jellyfin stop
service jellyfin start

Check you server log for SQLite errors and only continue to the next step if needed.

Reset Library Database & Load Fresh⚑
  • Shutdown Jellyfin
  • Do a copy of all your databases, copy the parent directory where your .db files are to bk.data
  • Rename library.db to library.corrupt
  • Restart Jellyfin
  • Run a Full Library Scan
Move all the journal databases away⚑

Finally I moved all the '*-journal' files to a directory, copied again the library-recovered.db to library.db, started the server, do a full scan.

Check the watched history⚑

Last time I followed these steps I lost part of the visualization history for the users (yikes!). So check that everything is alright.

If it's not follow these steps

Restore watched history⚑

Jellyfin stores the watched information in one of the .db files, there are two ways to restore it:

The user data is stored in the table UserDatas table in the library.db database file. The media data is stored in the TypedBaseItems table of the same database.

Comparing the contents of the tables of the broken database (lost watched content) and a backup database, I've seen that the media content is the same after a full library rescan, so the issue was fixed after injecting the missing user data from the backup to the working database through the importing a table from another database sqlite operation.

ReadOnly: SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException: attempt to write a readonly database⚑

Some of the database files of Jellyfin is not writable by the jellyfin user, check if you changed the ownership of the files, for example in the process of restoring a database file from backup.

Wrong image covers⚑

Remove all the jpg files of the directory and then fetch again the data from your favourite media management software.

Green bars in the reproduction⚑

It's related to some hardware transcoding issue related to some video codecs, the solution is to either get a file with other codec, or convert it yourself without the hardware transcoding with:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -c:v libx264 out.mp4

Stuck at login page⚑

Sometimes Jellyfin gets stuck at the login screen when trying to log in with an endlessly spinning loading wheel. It looks like it's already fixed, so first try to update to the latest version. If the error remains, follow the next steps:

To fix it run the next snippet:

systemctl stop jellyfin.service
mv /var/lib/jellyfin/data/jellyfin.db{,.bak}
systemctl start jellyfin.service
# Go to JF URL, get asked to log in even though
# there are no Users in the JF DB now
systemctl stop jellyfin.service
mv /var/lib/jellyfin/data/jellyfin.db{.bak,}
systemctl start jellyfin.service

If you use jfa-go for the invites, you may need to regenerate all the user profiles, so that the problem is not introduced again.

Issues⚑

References⚑

Last update: 2023-09-07