yazzy

I forgot to bring my portable Pi media server running Jellyfin on a family trip, but had a small selection of my ripped movie and TV show library on my portable SSD.

One dreaded part of choosing a movie or show to watch after a rainy afternoon and all other avenues of entertainment are exhausted is having the kids (especially the youngest, who can't read yet) choose a movie without the 'movie shelf' showing the movie posters/cover artwork.

So... without the Pi, and only armed with my MacBook Air, I thought I'd spin up a Jellyfin Docker container. Except, macOS is explicitly called out as unsupported for the Docker container for Jellyfin.

Switching tracks, I found Jellyfin is also packed up as a.app for macOS, and you can install it by downloading the.dmg and copying the.app to your Mac, or you can do it like I did, with Homebrew:

brew install --cask jellyfin

Once it's installed, open Jellyfin in the Applications folder to launch it. You won't see a traditional Dock icon or app window when it launches, it just runs in the background, with a tiny Jellyfin status menu in the menu bar:

Fire up your browser, and visit http://localhost:8096 to open up the Jellyfin UI (or just choose 'Launch' in the status menu, to be taken there directly).

Follow the wizard to choose a language and create your admin user, then when it asks about Media Libraries, add a media library (e.g. 'Movies') and browse to the path where all your media files are stored.

After you finish the setup wizard, wait a minute or so for the full media library scan to complete, then refresh the Jellyfin library page in your browser, and you should see all the available movies / shows...

To quit the Jellyfin server, click on the Jellyfin status menu, and choose 'Quit'. To uninstall, quit Jellyfin from the status menu, then drag Jellyfin.app to the Trash.

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