Syncing Playlists Between Two Jellyfin Instances

[jkt97]

Hi everyone,

I’m running two Jellyfin servers in different geographic locations. Both have the hostname jellyfin hardcoded via their local DNS, and both use the same media path on their servers (/media/videos/). The media folder is an SMB mount, and its contents are rsynced regularly between the two locations — so effectively, the media libraries are identical.

I’m using Infuse to stream content via Jellyfin in both locations. Because Infuse connects to http://jellyfin:8096/, and the hostname resolves locally, it works seamlessly in either place.

One Jellyfin instance runs in Docker, while the other is installed natively on a Mac (x86).

Now here’s the issue: Jellyfin stores playlists (and probably other metadata) locally. So when I’m in Location A, I can only see playlists created on that Jellyfin instance. When I switch to Location B, those playlists are gone — as expected, since they’re stored independently on each server.

Unfortunately, Infuse does not support managing playlists or collections when using Jellyfin as a backend. If it did, the problem wouldn’t exist, because Infuse could then sync those via iCloud across devices and locations.

So my question is:
Is there a way to sync playlists (and maybe collections) between two Jellyfin instances?
I’m fine with it being a one-way sync, or something I have to trigger manually (e.g., when traveling between the locations).

Has anyone done something similar, or can point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

[I-G-1-1]

If path of the media are exactly the same you could try to sync the content of "/var/lib/jellyfin/data/playlists/" between the two istances.

The most easy way should be copy from istance A to istance B deleting istance B playlists.

For a more complex bidirectional sync maybe somenthing like "rclone bisync" could help.

First of all make backups of "/var/lib/jellyfin/data/playlists/" of both istances to not loose any playlist while you try.

Then just try to use scp to copy "/var/lib/jellyfin/data/playlists/" from istance A to B to see if the playlist still work. Keep in mind that each playlist include this line:


<OwnerUserId>[REDACTED USERID]</OwnerUserId>


so I think the 2 istances of Jellfyn should have the same "UserId" (not only the username, but the same userID).
If the "UserId" for each username are different between the 2 istances you could use somenthing like sed (in linux) to find and replace the UserId before move from an istance to another.

[KodiUser1138]

Do playlists require the file path as well, like collections? I still don't understand this function. Kodi is able to generate lists from all sorts of parameters. Not being able to implement just library name/title and/or item tags, personal info pull etc seems counter to all the function JEllyfin does have. My lists in Kodi are awesome and most require no additional work when adding or changing media. Just upgrated several movies to Atmos audio and now need to find every instance in collections they are and re-add them. Can't even manually edit the XML in the collections directory to re-scan anymore. Frustrating. And then I can't easily share across to my friend's server, which seems to further restrict rather than expand useability. One of my biggest peeves about JF and on my signature wishlist.

[I-G-1-1]

if you open any jellyfin .xml file of a playlist you can find inside this for each track:

    <PlaylistItem>
      <Path>/path/to/your/audio/file/file.mp3</Path>
    </PlaylistItem>

So if you change the path your playlist become non-functional. 
At least you can easily find and replace the old path with the new path and recover the playlist.