Jellyfin

Jellyfin is the best full-featured personal media server that doesn’t rely on the cloud. It allows for GPU acceleration without a paid subscription. (Looking at you, Plex.)

Preparation

Incus Container

In the Incus GUI, create a new Trixie instance and attach the GPU in the devices section. It will list the hardware available for selection.

System Account

Jellyfin can update and save metadata and artwork alongside the media files instead of in server itself. To get the permissions right, set user numeric IDs in advance by pre-creating the system account.

sudo apt install curl

sudo addgroup --gid 1001 jellyfin

sudo adduser --uid 1001 --gid 1001 --home /var/lib/jellyfin --comment "Jellyfin default user" --disabled-login --disabled-password jellyfin

Installation

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

The full instructions are at:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/linux

Acceleration

On linux, you can use VA-API or QSV, the latter being preferred¹ for better performance. Since debian 13 only works with QSV, it’s an easy choice.

You need the intel-opencl-icd package and since it’s not in the Trixie repos right now, you’ll need to install it from Intel.

To quote the docs:

This package may not be available for newer distro since it currently relies on LLVM 14, which may not be in releases like Debian Trixie. If this is the case a release from the Intel compute-runtime repository may be used instead.

https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases

The jellyfin installer will add the service account to the video group for you, so it should just work by selecting ‘Intel Quicksync (QSV)’ in the Playback -> Transcoding settings and ‘/dev/dri/renderD128’ under that.

Leave everything else at the defaults

On the host, install the GPU tools sudo apt install intel-gpu-tools and observe with sudo intel_gpu_top during a transcode.

Note: The Jellyfin docs may will lead you test VA-API too, without being clear you don’t need it anymore.