Jellyfin Docker Permissions

[mark.monteiro]

I just finished setting up GPU acceleration today and ran into the exact same issue you've described here. In the end I just skipped over the ldconfig step and everything seemed to work fine without it.

I don't really know much about how the hardware acceleration stuff works, but if you've been having trouble getting it working, perhaps it's possible that the ldconfig issue is unrelated? In my case it took me a while to realize you need to run nvidia-smi on the host in order to verify that hardware acceleration is working. Running nvidia-smi from inside the container does not show any processes even when transcoding is happening.

[bitmap]

Also I think by not using a uid:guid option I am using a privileged user(root) as the jellyfin documentation says.

Misconception of what the documentation is trying to say. Setting the G/UID means the container interacts with files on your system as that user. It doesn't have all the same permissions as that user, but it acts as that user but proxy. So if you leave out the G/UID your volumes will appear to be owned by root/root which is not what you want (should be a service user or a well-secured non-root user).

Setting the container as privileged essentially removes the walls around the container and allows it to interact with the rest of the system. It's dangerous to run a container as privileged all the time (big generalization) but necessary or easier in some cases. Privileged flag very different from setting G/UID. One is like NFS squash, the other is the keys to the host OS, kernel, and hardware.

[rsmartapps]

The issue is that your user doesn't have the mounted device drivers group, I managed to run the jellyfin container with the host user::group adding the required extra groups to the user.

Code:

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    container_name: jellyfin
    user: "1000:1000"
    group_add:
    - 44  # GID for the video group
    - 992 # GID for the render group
    devices:
    - /dev/dri:/dev/dri