Streaming Your Media

Streaming media

Table of Contents

Continuing in my recent adventures with ProxMox, I’ve created a self-hosted streaming server. Nickflix, if you will. Here’s how to recreate it:

Installation

Create a new LXC in ProxMox using the latest LTS Debian release.

To temporarily use a password to ssh in instead of a key, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config with nano and change PermitRootLogin without-password to PermitRootLogin yes.

Next, update apt and any installed packages: apt update -y && apt upgrade -y (the -y automatically agrees to any prompts, usually size increase notices).

Install curl: apt install curl

Install Jellyfin: curl https://repo.jellyfin.org/install-debuntu.sh | bash

It should now be running, which you can access at http://<your-local-ip>:8096.

Mounting Media

You now have a server running, but you need to point it to where your media files are located.

To mount media using an unpriveledged container:

  1. SSH into the LXC
  2. Create a group with GID=10000 which matches the host 110000: groupadd -g 10000 lxc_shares
  3. Add users: usermod -aG lxc_shares USER
  4. Shutdown the LXC and switch back to the host, then create a mount point, such as mkdir -p /mnt/lxc_shares/my_nas
  5. Create a user and password with the appropriate permissions in your media server’s user management.
  6. Add SMB (CIFS) share to fstab: { echo '' ; echo '# Mount CIFS share on demand with rwx permissions for use in LXCs (manually added)' ; echo '//NAS/nas/ /mnt/lxc_shares/my_nas cifs _netdev,x-systemd.automount,noatime,uid=100000,gid=110000,dir_mode=0770,file_mode=0770,user=smb_username,pass=smb_password 0 0' ; } | tee -a /etc/fstab
  7. Mount the share on the host: mount /mnt/lxc_shares/my_nas
  8. Add a bind mount of the share to the LXC config: { echo 'mp0: /mnt/lxc_shares/nas_rwx/,mp=/mnt/nas,ro=1' ; } | tee -a /etc/pve/lxc/<LXC_ID>.conf
  9. Start the LXC. You should now see the NAS mounted in the /mnt/nas directory.

Passing through the GPU

Transcoding is a useful way of serving media to devices that may not have native capability to decode, say, HDR content. GPUs are much better suited to this task, so to pass a GPU in your system to the media server we just created, follow these steps:

  1. Open LXC to find the render GID and add 100,000 to it render:x:104:jellyfin -> 100104
  2. Open the host and find the GPU device info (usually renderD128): ls -l /dev/dri jellyfin

    GPU device info.

  3. Open nano again and add the following to the LXC’s conf making sure to use the noted number from earlier in the third line lxc.cgroup2.devices.allow: c 226:128 rwm lxc.mount.entry: /dev/dri/renderD128 dev/dri/renderD128 none bind,optional,create=file lxc.hook.pre-start: sh -c "chown 100000:100104 /dev/dri/renderD128"
  4. Back in the LXC, add the jellyfin account to the render group usermod -aG render jellyfin
  5. Finally, assuming you are using an Intel CPU with integrated GPU and quicksync support, install the appropriate package: apt install -y intel-opencl-icd
  6. Reboot the LXC, and that’s it! SMB media shares and passthrough hardware decoding is now enabled on your LXC. Easy!

Configure jellyfin

Even though we are passing through the GPU to the media server, we still need to tell the media server to utilize the device.

  1. Under Dashboards > Playback > transcoding, select Intel QuickSync (QSV) hardware acceleration
  2. Under QSV device, enter the default /dev/dri/renderD128
  3. Set the hardware decoding as you see fit.
  4. Enable VPP Tone mapping
  5. Under transcode path, enter /dev/shm to use the server’s RAM as a cache instead of the disk
  6. Select a stereo downmix algorithm; I use Dave750. I also set Throttle Transcodes and Delete segments, then the values to something like 300 and 720

References

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