Continuing our Jellyfin journey

This page is under construction

On our “Replacing PLEX Media Server“ page, we partially explain why we wanted to move from PLEX as our own local streaming source. Another factor in our decision was that, at some point, our Synology DS716+II could suffer a hardware failure or not have the necessary “power” to cope with some media forms in the future. Two 8TB hard drives failing precipitated our thoughts of possible hardware failure.

The following image shows the specifications of our DS716+II. The DS716+II ships with 2 GB of physical memory as standard. We upgraded ours to 8 GB soon after we received it.

The DS716+II comes with an Intel Celeron N3160. The “PassMark” benchmarks for a Celeron N3160 @ 1.6GHz are:

• Multi-thread Rating: 1202
• Single-thread Rating: 570

The GMKtec G3 Plus we purchased for our Jellyfin Media Server has an Intel N150 processor and 16GB of RAM; we ordered the black-coloured variant. We replaced the 512GB M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD with another, so that if there were any issues with the PC, we could reinstall the original NVMe that has Windows 11 installed and return the PC. The G3 Plus features one 2.5Gbps Ethernet port and four USB 3.2 ports. To ensure the server is accessible on both of our LANs, we added a UGREEN 2.5Gbps USB Ethernet Adapter.

The “PassMark” benchmarks for an Intel N150 @ 3.6GHz are:

Multi-thread Rating: 5448
Single-thread Rating: 1907

The GMKtec G3 Plus provides us with a significant step up in performance for transcoding, etc. The typical “Thermal Design Power” (TDP) of the N3160 and N150 are the same at 6 W.

Now that Synology is releasing Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that have restrictions on which hard drives are compatible with their NAS range. It makes sense to investigate other solutions for data storage and streaming.

At the time of writing, the base model of Synology’s value range is “Synology DiskStation DS124 1 Bay Desktop NAS”, which retails in the price region of £150 – £160. The GMKtec G3 Plus costs roughly the same as the DS124.

Wishing to reduce our reliance on Synology because of its policy on new NAS products, and forcing users to use hard drives that Synology has approved as compatible.

On Linux systems, NFS is the preferred method of accessing shared folders; it is easier to implement than Samba (SMB)

Example of mounting an NFS volume on a Synology NAS

sudo mount 192.***.***.***:/volume1/Media/Movies /home/media/movies

What should the mapping be for an Open Media Vault server that runs “mergefs” and displays the absolute path on our system as “/srv/mergerfs/G3_Pool/Media”?

We wasted quite a lot of time working on trying to get variants of the following to mount the data on the Open Media Server (OMV) from the Jellyfin server

192.***.***.***:/srv/mergerfs/G3_Pool/Media/Flac_Music /home/media/flac_music

Every variant we tried, we got a refusal to connect; the suggested error was a security issue. We altered the permissions on the shared folder, reinstalled OMV, and even tried starting afresh by installing TrueNAS. Quickly went back to Open Media Vault as we are more familiar with that server, as we have RPi based backup server running Open Media Vault for quite a few months.

By sheer chance, we tried to get our MoOde music server connected to the OMV media server, Samba (SMB) worked fine, as did our Windows 11 PCs. Knowing that things should be easier for Linux-based PCs and servers to communicate NFS, we tried the NFS option on the MoODe system, and the drop-down prompted “192.***.***.***/export/Media/Flac_Music“.

So we tried replacing “/srv/mergerfs/G3_Pool/” with “/export/“, hey presto, the Jellyfin server mounted the OMV volume with no errors.

If you wish to mount the “shared folders” automatically when the Jellyfin server boots, you need to add lines similar to the following one, adding them to the file “/etc/fstab”

192.***.***.***:/export/Media/Flac_Music /home/media/flac_music nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0

You could use either vi or nano to edit the file. Personally, we prefer nano, so the edit command would be as follows:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

For each type of media library you want to have in Jellyfin, you need to create a separate share / mount

We have created the following media libraries in Jellyfin:

• Movies
• TV Shows
• Music
• Home Videos & Photos

So we had to add four lines similar to the following into /etc/fstab, one for each shared folder, similar to the following:

• 192.***.***.***:/export/Media/Movies /home/media/movies nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0
• 192.***.***.***:/export/Media/TV_Shows /home/media/tv nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0
• 192.***.***.***:/export/Media/Flac_Music /home/media/flac_music nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0
• 192.***.***.***:/export/Media/Photos /home/media/photos nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0

If you encounter playback issues on the Jellyfin server and you can’t seem to get Jellyfin to re-scan the media folders, then you might have discovered the “stale file handle” problem. To prove if this is the problem, you need to SSH into the Jellyfin host, then try to list the contents of one of the local mount points, such as the following:

On our Jellyfin server the local mount directory for movies is:

/home/media/movies

So try something such the following:

• cd /media/movies ↩
• ls ↩

If you get a statement about “stale handles”, then you need to unmount each local mount and then reboot the Jellyfin server, the reboot will only work if the local to remote entries are present in the /etc/fstab file.

On our Jellyfin system, we would do the following:

• cd media ↩
• sudo umount movies ↩
• sudo umount tv ↩
• sudo umount flac_music ↩
• sudo umount photos ↩
• sudo reboot ↩

As much as we like the Synology NAS units we have, we are making a conscious effort to move some of our data onto different equipment. At the moment, we rely on Synology Surveillance Station; the more important CCTV feeds go to one Synology NAS, where we have purchased some additional licences, though we now begrudge paying almost £50 per licence, to see and record the camera inputs in one place.

The less critical cameras record onto other Synology NAS units because each NAS has two free Surveillance licenses.

We are looking at some open-source CCTV solutions, we will document the solution we choose here.

When the 8TB drives starting failing in our main media server NAS