Jellyfin server with Docker compose

Docker Compose

Switched to using Docker compose for web services. It’s a lot easier to manage compared to using systemd config files. Using docker makes it very easy to recreate services as well and wipe everything to start from scratch.

Docker Compose for Jellyfin

Here’s an example compose.yml file for Jellyfin. After installing Docker, just use docker compose up to bring up the service.

jellyfin:
  image: jellyfin/jellyfin
  container_name: jellyfin
  network_mode: 'host'
  volumes:
    - ./services/jellyfin/config:/config
    - ./services/jellyfin/cache:/cache
    - ./services/jellyfin/media:/media
  devices:
    - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
    - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0
  restart: always

This will store all Jellyfin related files in ./services/jellyfin/*. Using these bind points will ensure our config files are persistent.

Hardware Acceleration with Intel QuickSync

The devices section in the docker compose is to enable the docker container to access the Intel GPU. This is to enable hardware acceleration on Jellyfin. I had to spend some time getting Intel QuickSync up and running for the N100 processor on Ubuntu Jammy so briefly documenting the steps I took.

Install the latest kernel

I didn’t have to compile a newer version of the kernel. Just had to do

sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-22.04

and that kernel seems to support the N100 and quicksync.

Install jellyfin-ffmpeg

This step is optional but was very helpful to try and debug all the various issues I was seeing

Install intel-gpu-tools

Also optional but very useful to test if video transcoding is actually working with the intel_gpu_top application.

Follow Jellyfin HWA guide

Follow the Jellyfin HWA guide. It’s probably better to test everything and make sure it works on the host machine before moving on to docker.

Update docker compose

Add the devices section to the jellyfin docker compose service config. It’s important to do docker compose down && docker compose up instead of docker compose restart to make sure the changes are picked up`