SOLVED: Installing jellyfin-ffmpeg on Fedora

[ata_dree]

Hello,

I recently installed Jellyfin (10.10.7) and I'm trying to get it set up correctly. I understand that the ffmpeg package from rpm is not sufficient for jellyfin transcoding but I'm having a bit of trouble understanding how to get jellyfin-ffmpeg properly installed on my Fedora 42 machine which has a modern Nvidia GPU.

Sorry in advance if these questions about this are very noob-ish.

I downloaded jellyfin-ffmpeg_7.1.1-2_portable_linux64-gpl.tar.xz from github manually and extracted it but where do put the files now and how do I make jellyfin use these instead of the regular ones?

The "normal" ffmpeg and ffprobe are located in /usr/bin, do I just replace these? If I do, won't they just get overwritten whenever dnf has an update for regular ffmpeg? If I copy them to somewhere like /opt/jellyfin-ffmpeg, how do I make Jellyfin use these instead of the standard ones? I tried adding <FFmpegPath>/opt/jellyfin-ffmpeg</FFmpegPath> to jellyfins system.xml, but whenever I restart the service it gets removed.

Thanks in advance, I wish I was better at this stuff.

[Cutter]

There's a parameter in Dashboard > Playback > Transcoding > Path to ffmpeg. Check that jellyfin has the right to read and execute files in that dir.
The recommended way to install Jellyfin on Fedora is in a container. The container image includes ffmpeg-jellyfin. Setting up the container can be complex though, especially if you want to run it rootless as it should.

[nyanmisaka]

According to the sources, the jellyfin command line parameter --ffmpeg=/path/to/ffmpeg has the highest priority, followed by the xml configuration, and finally the default ffmpeg command will be tried.

- https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/blo...er.cs#L186

- https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-pac...llyfin#L31

[ata_dree]

There's a parameter in Dashboard > Playback > Transcoding > Path to ffmpeg. Check that jellyfin has the right to read and execute files in that dir.
The recommended way to install Jellyfin on Fedora is in a container. The container image includes ffmpeg-jellyfin. Setting up the container can be complex though, especially if you want to run it rootless as it should be.

Path to ffmpeg just says ffmpeg for me, with no option of changing it.
Could you elaborate on installation in a container? I just followed these docs (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/instal...tributions) but I've understood it as them not using ffmpeg-jellyfin?

[Cutter]

RPMFusion doesn't provide ffmpeg-jellyfin, only regular ffmpeg.

For the installation in a container, see: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/instal.../container
Podman is Fedora's go-to container manager.

[ata_dree]

I managed to solve it. Turns out it's the encoding.xml file that needs modifying and not `system.xml'.
Adding this tag did the trick.

Code:

<EncoderAppPath>/path/to/jellyfin-ffmpeg/ffmpeg</EncoderAppPath>