Pyrosis @ pyrosis @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

I noticed some updates on live video streaming. I do wonder if that will help in how jellyfin interepts commercial breaks.

Let's say I have an m3u8 playlist with a bunch of video streams. I've noticed in jellyfin when they go to like a commercial the stream freaks out. It made me wonder if the player just couldn't understand the ad insertion.

Anyway wonderful update regardless and huge improvement.

Another thing to keep in mind with zfs is underlying vm disks will perform better if the zfs pool is a type of mirror or stripe of mirrors. Z1 Z2 type pools are better for media and files. Cm disk io will improve on the mirror type style dramatically. Just passing what I've learned over time in optimizing systems.

Bookmark this if you utilize zfs at all. It will serve you well.

https://jrs-s.net/2018/08/17/zfs-tuning-cheat-sheet/

You will be amused with zfs performance in proxmox due to all the tuning that is possible. If this is going to be an existing zfs pool keep in mind it's easier to just install proxmox with the zfs option and let it create a zfs rpool during setup. For the rpool tweak a couple options. Make sure ashift is at least 12 during the install or 13 if you are using some crazy fast SSD as proxdisk for the rpool.

It needs to be 12 if it's a modern day spinner and probably a good setting for most ssds. Do not go over 12 if it's a spinning disk.

Now beyond that you can directly import your existing zfs pool into proxmox with a single import command. Assuming you have an existing zfs pool.

In this scenario zfs would be fully maintaining disk operations for both an rpool and a media pool.

You should consider tweaking a couple things to really improve performance via the guide de I linked.

Proxmox vms/zvols live in their own dataset. Before you start getting to crazy creating vms make sure you are taking advantage of all the performance tweaks you can. By default proxmox sets a default record size for all datasets to 128k. qcow2, raw, and even zvols will benefit from record size of 64k because it tends to improve the underlying filesystem performance of things like ext4, XFS, even UFS. Imo it's silly to create vm filesystems like btrfs if you're vm is sitting on top of a cow filesystem.

Another huge improvement is tweaking the compression algorithm. lz4 is blazing fast and should be your default go to for zfs. The new one is pretty good but can slow things down a bit for active operations like active vm disks. So make sure your default compression is lz4 for datasets with vm disks. Honestly it's just a good default to specify for the entire pool. You can select other compressions for datasets with more static data.

If you have a media dataset full of files like music, vids, pics. Setting a record size of 1mb will heavily improve disk io operations.

In proxmox it will default to grabbing half of your memory for arc. Make sure you change that after install. It's a file that defines arc_max in byte number format. Set the max to something more reasonable if you have 64 gigs of memory. You can also define the arc_min

Some other huge improvements? If you are using an SSD for your proxmox install I highly recommend you install log2ram on your hypervisor. It will stop all those constant log writes on your SSD. It will also sync them to disk on a timer and shutdown/reboot. It's also a huge performance and SSD lifespan improvement to migrate /tmp and /var/tmp to tmpfs

So many knobs to turn. I hope you have fun playing with this.

I agree with this. The only vm I have that has multiple interfaces is an opnsense router vm heavily optimized for kvm to reach 10gb speeds.

One of the interfaces beyond wan and lan is an interface that links to a proxmox services bridge. It's a proxbridge I gave to a container and is just a gateway in opnsense. It points traffic destined for services directly at the container ip. It keeps the service traffic on the bridge instead of having to hit the physical network.

I use using docker networks but that's me. They are created for every service and it's easy to target the gateway. Just make sure DNS is correct for your hostnames.

Lately I've been optimizing remote services for reverse proxy passthru. Did you know that it can break streams momentarily and make your proxy work a little harder if your host names don't match outside and in?

So in other words if you want full passthru of a tcp or udp stream to your server without the proxy breaking it then opening a new stream you would have to make sure the internal network and external network are using the same fqdn for the service you are targeting.

It actually can break passthru via sni if they don't use the same hostname and cause a slight delay. Kinda matters for things like streaming videos. Especially if you are using a reverse proxy and the service supports quic or http2.

So a reverse proxy entry that simply passes without breaking the stream and resending it might ook like...

Obviously you would need to get the http port working on jellyfin and have ipv6 working with internal DNS in this example.

    
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;  # Listen on IPv6 address

    server_name jellyfin.example.net;

    ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl_certificate.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl_certificate.key;

    location / {
        proxy_pass https://jellyfin.example.net:8920;  # Use FQDN
        ...
    }
}

  

Yup you can. In fact you likely should and will probably find yourself improving disk io dramatically compared to your original thoughts doing this. It's better in my opinion to let the hypervisor manage disks operations. That means in my opinion it should also share files with smb and NFS especially if you are already considering nas type operations.

Since proxmox supports zfs out of the box along with btrfs and even XFS you have a myriad of options. You combine that with cockpit and you have a nice management interface.

I went the zfs route because I'm familiar with it and I appreciate it's native sharing options built into the filesystem. It's cool to have the option to create a new dataset off the pool and directly pass it into a new lxc container.

It depends on your needs. It's entirely possible to just format a bunch of disks as xfs and setup some mount points you hand to a union filesystem like mergerfs or whatever. Then you would just hand that to proxmox directly as a storage location. Management can absolutely vary depending how you do this.

At its heart it's just Debian so it has all those abilities of Debian. The web UI is more tuned to vm/lxc management operations. I don't really like the default lvm/ext4 but they do that to give access to snapshots.

I personally just imported an existing zfs pool into proxmox and configured it to my liking. I discovered options like directly passing datasets into lxc containers with lxc options like lxc.mount.entry

I recently finished optimizing my proxmox for performance in regards to disk io. It's modified with things like log2ram, tmpfs in fstab for /tmp and /var/tmp, tcp congestion control set to cubic, a virtual opnsense heavily modified for 10gb performance, a bunch of zfs media datasets migrated to one media dataset and optimized for performance. Just so many tweaks and knobs to turn in proxmox that can increase performance. Folks even mention docker I've got it contained in an lxc. My active ram usage for all my services down to 7 gigs and disk io jumping .9 - 8%. That's crazy but it just works.

Have you considered the increase in disk io and that hypervisor prefer to be in control of all hardware? Including disks...

If you are set on proxmox consider that it can directly share your data itself. This could be made easy with cockpit and the zfs plugin. The plugin helps if you have existing pools. Both can be installed directly on proxmox and present a separate web UI with different options for system management.

The safe things here to use are the filesharing and pool management operations. Basically use the proxmox webui for everything it permits first.

Either way have fun.

It's the production vs development issue. My advice is the old tech advice. "If it's not broken don't try to fix it"

Modified into a separate proxmox development environment. Btw proxmox is perfect for this with vm and container snapshots.

When you get a vm or container in a more production ready state then you can attempt migrations. That way the users don't kill you :)

To most of your comment I completely agree minus the freedom for choosing different disk sizes. You absolutely can do that with btrfs or just throwing a virtual layer on top of some disks with something like mergerfs.

Music playlists are different from Plex. You can create them import them or generate an instant list.

4k is seamless and performs better imo. You can use transcoding or not if you have files they way you want them. If you do you can select on a per user basis who gets to transcode.

You can set bandwidth limits.

I've seen a feature to allow multi user streaming the same movie so you ig watch at the same time. I use npm and often a couple peeps might watch a movie at the same time without using this feature and works fine

I use the client app on Android and a firestick atm. I think I just downloaded it but you can side load too if you want. The media server app is available for various os. So technically you could set it up on whatever you want. Just check your app store

https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/

It can plug into homebrew or m3u playlists for live tv if that is your suggestion. It has a plugin for nextpvr and tvheadend if you utilize those for over the air or already have an m3u setup too in those pvr services. Those are great btw and available in docker containers.

It always defaulted to what I have my files encoded. It absolutely can transcode to support other clients and you decide preferences. I did notice since most of my files are h.264 with few h265 sometimes it helped to turn off transcoding for me because the client supported it natively. Jellyfin was transcoding h265 mkv to like an MP4. Anyway a quirk

Login is pretty simple. Passwords users can change. Has codes it can generate to approve a new device if you are already logged into an app on your phone. Like 6 temp numbers. Can also setup pins or whatever they call them under users.

Pretty much this it gets it's own folder and in jellyfin it's own library. You just give mom access to this and whatever else you want to. you unselect that library for everyone else. The setting is under users. It's straightforward and is a check mark based select. You probably have it set to all libraries right now. Uncheck that and you can pick and choose per user.

I doubt it would matter in some environments at all.

As an example a pc managed by a domain controller that can modify firewall rules and dhcp/dns options via group policy. At that point firewall rules can be modified.

Of course but you don't control rogue dhcp servers some asshat might plug in anywhere else that isn't your network

How about defense against dhcp option 121 changing the routing table and decloaking all VPN traffic even with your kill switch on? They got a plan for that yet? Just found this today.

https://www.leviathansecurity.com/blog/tunnelvision

Nothing but love for that project. I've been using docker-ce and docker-compse. I had portainer-ce but just got tired of it. It's easier for me to just make a compose file and get things working exactly like I want.

Oh then definitely tvheadend. You can run the server lots of ways even docker. Also has plugin support.

Are you using tvheadend and their jellyfin plugin? Asking out of curiosity.

https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend

Anyway Plex and emby come to mind.

I'll be honest op if it's on a TV I use the newer fire sticks with the jellyfin app. They already have support for various codecs and stream from my server just fine. Cheap too and come with a remote.

If I were just trying to get a home made client up I would consider Debian bookworm and just utilize the Deb from the GitHub link here...

https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/

Personally I'd throw on cockpit to make remote administration a bit easier and setup an auto start at login for the jellyfin media player with the startup apps. You can even add a launch variable to launch it full screen like...

    
jellyfin --fullscreen

  

The media player doesn't really need special privileges so you could create a basic user account just for jellyfin.

Setups for hardware decoding are based on the underlying OS. An example quite common is docker on Debian or Ubuntu. You will need to pass the appropriate /dev/ directories and at times files into your jellyfin docker container with the device environment variable. Commonly that would be /dev/dri

It gets more complicated with a vm because you are likely going to be passing the hardware directly into the vm which will prevent other devices outside the vm from using it.

You can get around this by placing docker directly on the os or placing docker in a Linux container with appropriate permissions and the same devices passed into the Linux container. In this manner system devices and other services will still have access the the video card.

All this to say it depends on your setup and where you have docker installed how you will pass the hardware into jellyfin. However jellyfin on docker will need you to pass the video card into the container with the device environment variable. Docker will need to see the device to be able to do that.