jellyfin media adding

[slav]

Hey people,

I have a conceptual question, I guess. I have watched some guides on the topic of Jellyfin setup and I am a bit confused, so hopefully somebody can clear stuff for me.

I have a ps4 and have the Media Player app running and through DLNA it finds my jellyfin. This is installed and running fine on a separate Ubuntu server Jammy. When I try to connect to it via ps4 Media Player it finds it and displays - 'Nothing here' or something to that effect, but that is fine since I have not added media. Now my question, should this media be in my server, should it be stored there, or should it be on another machine. Based on what I have seen, people usually advise noobs to create media folders in /home/whateveruser/ (I don't know if this is a good idea) and use FileZilla for example to move stuff. But from where? From my machine to the jellyfin server or what? 

Any advice is welcome!

[use7]

There's more info in the documentation, but tldr you'll want to create a directory on your jellyfin server that is readable and writable by jellyfin, I usually create that folder somewhere other than home, but you can do something like '/home/jellyfin' and put stuff there (I'd avoid doing it under /home/youruser as that can make things difficult to set permissions properly sometimes for JF; but others in here may have had more luck and they can let you know how/why they did things that way).  If you want JF to then be able to find the media you will have to open the JF dashboard->library->"Add media library" and select/type in your libraries.  If you don't see the folders (or get 'permission denied'-esk errors, double check that the JF user (if running bare metal), or the docker container have access to these folders.  You can add more media by putting it into these created folders (either through filezilla if you have (s)ftp seet up, or simply by plugging in a usb stick and copy/pasteing).  Note that the docs also have information for how to name your files and subdirs. so that jellyfin is able to identify them properly.

[TheDreadPirate]

Not sure what guides those are, but definitely do NOT store media in your home directory. Since the jellyfin server runs as the jellyfin user, that requires you to open up the permissions on your home directory. Which is exactly the opposite of the point of a home directory.

Create a root level folder to house your media. /media is probably there, by default, in Jammy and is a common place to store your media for jellyfin.

[bitmap]

Conceptually, you can store your media anywhere. Your Jellyfin server -- where you are running the server software -- just needs to be able to access it. In terms of "access" that means a minimum of read and execute, but generally read, write, and execute (in order to save metadata, images, etc...). This access can be by whatever means you want -- direct via SATA, USB, network/NAS, it can be on a remote server, some folks use tools like rclone to mount cloud storage like Google Drive...

So from a high level? Your media can live wherever, but your server must be able to access it. The information others shared as to locations is largely up to preference, other than the fact that putting media in your /home/user folder is a recipe for permissions hell followed by security hell. Use something like a /mnt/media folder (I have all of my various drives mounted as subfolders of /mnt/media which has worked out wonderfully).

[slav]

Thank you very much for all the replies from everyone. Lots of things have been cleared up. I can not connect to the server via SFTP and I guess based on some articles I have read something is not configured properly when it comes to the files which govern such communication. I will make a VM so that I can tinker with it, no hurry.