#transcoding

Building a Production-Grade Private Netflix with Jellyfin

Let's be brutally honest about self-hosted media servers. Running Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop is fine if you are the only one watching 1080p movies locally.

But what happens when you share your server with 5 friends? What happens when you try to stream a 50GB 4K movie while traveling on mobile data?

Your hardware will choke. The stream will buffer endlessly. And your home internet's upload speed will bottleneck everyone.

You need a true Production-Grade Netflix Alternative. In our latest ServerMO engineering blueprint, we bypass the beginner stuff and teach you the SysAdmin way to deploy Jellyfin securely on an Ubuntu 24.04 Dedicated Server.

The SysAdmin Playbook:

⚡ The RAM Disk Hack: We map a /transcode directory to tmpfs in Docker. This forces transcoding caches into RAM, saving your SSD from burning out.

🎥 Solving GPU Permissions: Most tutorials fail here. We show you exactly how to find your Linux render group ID (getent group render) and pass your NVIDIA or Intel GPU into the container for flawless 4K-to-mobile compression.

🔒 Enterprise Nginx Routing: Never stream over plain HTTP. We provide the exact Nginx config to disable buffering (proxy_buffering off;), enable WebSockets, and secure everything with Certbot SSL.

🚀 1Gbps Symmetric Power: Ditch the home internet upload limits. A ServerMO Bare Metal server provides the unshared network and compute resources needed for multiple remote users.

Say goodbye to endless loading screens and build your streaming empire the right way. 🏢

These are instructions to transcode in Avid Media Composer for a professional network workflow. It’s been used for television programs on HBO, PBS, and other networks.

For cheaper cameras like the SONY AS7, CANON 5D series or often most cameras that shoot in the H.264 codec, you need to relabel the linked clips before you import them. This is just to ensure that each clip has a unique and individual name to help later on with the Onlining process. Add the Disk Label with an underscore to the very beginning of each clip. An example is as follows: Original Name: C001 changed to the Modified Name: AxS01_20180918_NEG01_1of1_C001.

In a new bin, right click. In the drop down menu choose Input > Source Browser.

In the pop-up window, navigate to the desired camera card. Click on the root of the camera card. Double check that the target bin at the bottom right of the window is the bin you want to populate with the clips in and press the link button.

Check to take out the data tracks and any blank audio tracks that come in with the clip. This is common extra data that is imported into Avid that are annoying to edit with from SONY cameras like the FS7 as well as other brands of cameras. Do your research and know your camera and what was recorded by talking to the camera operators or reading the camera reports.

Once the clips have populated in your bin, highlight all of the clips and right click. In the drop down menu select Modify > Unlink Media. (The clips need to be Offline/The AMA link broken in order to modify the clip)

Select all the clips again, right click and select Modify > Modify Clip. 

At the top of the new pop up window, click the drop down menu and Set Tracks. Uncheck the D (Data) Track at the bottom and deselect any blank audio tracks (TBD which are blank). 

Once you’ve disabled the Data track and blank audio tracks, click OK. 

Right click inside the bin and select Import > Source Browser again from the drop down menu. Navigate back to the card folder and click the link. The clips should appear online in the bin now, but without the Data track and any audio tracks you also disabled.

Live-streaming requires maintaining good quality throughout the whole broadcasting process. Technically it is possible to transmux bitrates without transcoding them, but since cutting the video into fragments is carried out simultaneously across all lower bitrates, a mismatch in their structure or delay can lead to desynchronization in the player or artifacts when switching between lower bitrates. We recommend transcoding the input stream together with the lower bitrates. This would decrease the buffering and allow a smoother output.