You don't need JELLYFIN, EMBY, OR PLEX
You don't need JELLYFIN, EMBY, OR PLEX
So you want a media server? And everyone says you should be using Jellyfin, Emby, or Plex. But why? I show you a simpler approach, that’s free and easy to do.
I also have it written out on my blog to make it even easier:
https://grafick.art/super-simple-stre…
Content
0.24 -> so i'm sure you've heard of uh plex and emby and
jellyfin now and there are tons of articles about
6.8 -> installing all of these platforms and the
processing power needed to transcode your
11.68 -> media but what if i said that most likely
depending on your situation you didn't need to do
18.8 -> any of that that you didn't need a robust computer
as the brains of the operation and you don't need
24.88 -> to be stuck to a particular platform and use only
their software you know it's 2022 and end devices
32.96 -> you know like your phone your tablet a fire stick
are more than capable of playing lots of different
39.76 -> media my lg g6 from 2017 is capable of playing
4k content and for only $30 you know when it's
48.96 -> usually on sale you can get a fire stick 4k and
and it's a powerhouse so the real question becomes
55.76 -> do we really need to transcode anything and do
we really need to have a complicated setup to
60.96 -> organize our media i don't think so and here's
my super simple solution we're going to stream
66.96 -> everything from a web server just a regular
old http web server and that's basically it
74.32 -> most media players are capable of playing
streaming content however i'm sure you want
79.12 -> to like organize your content in a meaningful way
right? with poster images and all that cool stuff
84.48 -> well Kodi can do that yeah yes good old Kodi
and it's still being updated to this day
92.08 -> and Kodi supports a lot of different protocols
so http https ftp samba network file share
99.04 -> et cetera et cetera and you can add it as a
source and it will organize your media for you
106 -> and personally i prefer http if you're on a local
network or https if you're outside of your network
113.2 -> like if you have a VPS across the internet and you
know you only need a basic single board computer
119.92 -> like a raspberry pi and in this example i'm going
to use an orange pi zero lts which is extremely
127.68 -> you know weak but it's capable because it has
ethernet and it has 512 megabytes of ram which is
135.2 -> plenty to just serve files so way back when
i bought this orange pi zero it was only $16
142.4 -> it cost more now but you know because of the
pandemic and all that but i wouldn't recommend
147.6 -> getting an orange pi zero now i recommend you get
something else or use an old computer, you can use
152.16 -> whatever you want you can even use an android
box tv box and install a web server on that too
158.88 -> do whatever you want whatever you're comfortable
doing but my point is that all we have to
163.2 -> do is serve files from a regular web server over
to kodi that's it so i'm going to explain that
170.96 -> and i'm going to go over it because my personal
setup i have a vps and i stream everything from
176.88 -> it and it's awesome and i want to share the
awesomeness with you and it was not complicated
182.32 -> to set up it's super easy to set up that's why i
made this video because i feel like everybody's
188.16 -> pushing for jellyfin or emby or still to the this
day, plex, for whatever reason even though i don't
192.96 -> think plex is free and it doesn't make any sense
to me this is way easier this is simple it's free
199.2 -> so you decide if it's worth your time or not
it's worth my time because i use it every day
204.32 -> and like i said it's awesome so here we go. so i'm
recording now and i'm gonna log into the armbian
213.36 -> instance on my orange pi zero and i've already
set up a user which is going to ask you
221.2 -> you know to set up a new password which
i did i didn't make a new user but i did
225.52 -> change the root password so the first thing
we have to do as always is do an update and
232.8 -> i'm gonna do an upgrade as well which is not
really necessary but i'm gonna do it anyway
241.6 -> do have the orange pi zero lts connected over
ethernet which is the best way to connect any of
247.36 -> your servers on your network ethernet it would be
the best latency will be super low i'll show you
255.68 -> later why that's important if you're scrubbing
through video so it's finishing up the update
262.16 -> process it's going to tell me in a second what
is there to upgrade and i'm just gonna say yes
274 -> yes and enter it's gonna go through do its thing
283.84 -> like i said it's not really
super important that you upgrade
288.4 -> but you do need to update to just at least get
the latest servers see what packages are available
299.6 -> and again you can do this with any
device any computer you can actually
304.8 -> do this from an android device if you want to
obviously you wouldn't do linux commands but
309.44 -> there are packages out there that will serve
a web server from android or even windows
319.36 -> okay so it finally finished
it did notice all its little
323.36 -> upgrades and so now we're going to install nginx
341.12 -> and we're just gonna say yes
345.68 -> it's gonna install more packages
372 -> okay so it's done it wasn't that long uh so
375.28 -> what i do is i always stop the nginx service
first most people would use "systemctl"
383.52 -> i use "service" it works fine for me
so i just put service engine x stop
395.36 -> okay so the service is stopped um that means we
can edit the files which are in etc so we'll go
402.96 -> to etc go nginx and we'll see what the directory
looks like we should be going to sites available
412.8 -> and then we have our default so we're going to
nano into that and we're going to edit this file
420.56 -> it's up to you what you want to do here um
424.4 -> i'm going to change this to uh
something else the root directory here
432.32 -> because that's where our files are if you didn't
if you're not familiar with nginx or any type of
437.2 -> web server there's usually a root directory where
your index file your html file or your php file
444.64 -> for your website is in our case i'm going to
mount it to a specific folder i'm going to call it
458.16 -> thumb i'm just going to call
it thumb for thumb drive
462.8 -> okay and then in the location i'm
going to do something super important
468.24 -> i'm going to put autoindex on semicolon and the
reason i put auto index on is so when a folder
477.84 -> gets served from nginx it's going to automatically
create an index and show all the files in that
484 -> folder kodi is going to need that index to serve
you your video files so that's it we're going
491.44 -> to exit out i'm going to save it i'm going to
save to the buffer save over it and let's go to
499.68 -> mounting our flash drive in this case i have all
my well i should say one video on a flash drive
507.28 -> and i'm going to quickly see where it is it's
on sda1 so what i'm going to do is mount it to
519.36 -> thumb
524.32 -> let's see okay i just realized what i did wrong
528.56 -> i need to back out and make this folder so
let's back out all the way to the beginning
536.32 -> so now we're at the root so we're going to make
a directory and we're going to call it thumb
543.44 -> then we're going to mount our thumb drive to this
folder so now when i go into thumb it should show
558.64 -> our video so i have an old kung fu
movie here and it shows as mounted
563.52 -> which is great now this will only mount the drive
for this one session meaning until it restarts
571.44 -> you would need to have it automatically mount
every time but that's not for this video to do
579.68 -> if you really want to know how to
do that i'll comment it down below
583.2 -> but basically this is only good for this just to
show you what to do so we have our we have our
593.6 -> folder mounted and we have nginx off so
let's go ahead and start nginx up again
606.88 -> and there we go and i'm going
to switch to the browser
614.16 -> so i've switched to the browser and i've gone to
the ip address of our server which is an orange
622.24 -> pi in this case but it could be anything that
you set up on even a vps across the internet and
628.8 -> nginx is showing me this directory and it
shows the index because we put auto index on
635.76 -> and we're going to go to the movie folder inside
there's a movie and if i click it because it's
641.2 -> h.264 uh i can stream it in the browser and we
can watch it directly in the browser but we're
648.8 -> going to take it a step further we're going to
take it a step further and we're going to serve
654.32 -> this video file or this folder actually to
cody and therefore it should inspire you to
662 -> you know add more videos to the folder
or multiple folders you can have multiple
666.88 -> folders you know movies tv shows whatever you
want so let's go over to cody and set that up
674.56 -> so now we're in kodi and yours should look kind
of like this i have a few items removed here that
680.88 -> i don't need but that's okay it should look more
or less yours should look more or less like mine
687.68 -> so i'm going to go to settings and go to media go
videos i'm going to add videos i'm going to browse
698.56 -> and i'm going to add a network location
so it's interesting about kodi is it
703.36 -> supports a ton of different protocols even
samba which is the standard window share
709.84 -> but we're going to go up and they say https which
is awesome for vps's you should never ever share
717.2 -> files over the internet over regular http should
always be ssl secured but in this case we're just
724.88 -> going to do a regular server for our internal
network so i know my little orange pie zero
734.88 -> uh has an ip address of one nine two one six
eight one one forty three put that in there
740.72 -> there's no rebound path it's the default path and
no username or password you should have a username
747.6 -> and password if you feel you need it to be more
secure especially with vps across the internet
753.28 -> uh port 80 is the normal web server port just
press ok and there was no error which means it
760.56 -> worked so if i click on the server and there it is
there's our movie folder so now we just press ok
768.24 -> and i'm going to name it i'm going to name it
kung fu you can name it whatever you want your
774.8 -> name in movies tv shows however you wish i'm gonna
press ok it's gonna ask me what's in the directory
781.6 -> i'm gonna tell it it's a movie and i'm gonna
tell it normally uh i'm gonna tell that the
787.6 -> movies are in separate folders meaning like
when you normally when you download movies
793.12 -> especially on bittorrent uh it separates
them into folders so if i clicking that
799.92 -> it will let cody know that each folder should
have a movie in it and i'm just going to press ok
808.96 -> and you want to refresh yes and it's going
to start scanning folder already did it so
815.2 -> if we go back let's go back and back and
back and there it is there's the movie and
823.44 -> to show you how awesome it is we can go to
information let me give you all this cool
827.92 -> information trailer star ratings you can change
the artwork on the movie poster if you wanted to
837.68 -> and let's go back and just play the movie
846.32 -> and i'm gonna skip around
850.64 -> and you see how quick that is i can just skip
around super quick since it's on our network
859.2 -> so that's it so yeah that's that's basically it
865.36 -> so as you add movies you can update the folder
and there's an option here to automatically
873.44 -> update on startup see update librarian startup
and they can scan a folder for you and if you're
879.52 -> just starting out i highly recommend you do
something like this especially if you have like a
885.84 -> single board computer just laying around i mean
let's be honest uh i think a lot of us have
892.4 -> older older computers or raspberry pi's
or whatever just not doing anything
896.56 -> this will even work on a raspberry pi zero if
you have it connected to a hub or something um
903.52 -> that's it yeah so i hope you enjoyed this video
and like share subscribe if you think it was
909.92 -> useful comment if you think you can make it better
if you really want to know how to set up a vps
915.36 -> across the internet let me
know i'll do it and that's it
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREBMpLC4QY