I run a full media server, as well do a few friends. Now we had the idea to share our media libraries. In a first quick attempt we, mounted each other’s library folder via an smb share and imported those in jellyfin (all servers connected by VPN) Works quite well, but is kind of cumbersome the more people get in. I had the following idea: distributed storage, not as in redundancy, but more like mergerfs. Each “node” allocates a certain amount of storage, say node A, B and C provide 1TB each, these get fused into a singe mount that shows up as 3TB volume. If one node goes offline, the volume will only be 2TB and all files on the offline node will of course be unavailable.

Did a bit of research and found stuff like ceph,.glusterfs or seeweedfs, all of which I guess have a lot more functionality and thus are quite complicated and a little over my head. Do you do something like that or have any good ideas how to do that easily?

  • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    111·
    11 months ago

    I use Plex instead of jellyfin, but there’s the ability to just add a friends library and it pulls in without mounting anything. I thought Jellydin had that as well?

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      81·
      11 months ago

      I run Plex too, and indeed library sharing is built right in and ridiculously easy to set up.

      I think OP is already doing things the best way possible in Jellyfin by mounting others’ servers remotely over VPN

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
      106·
      11 months ago

      plex uses a centralized service for this kinda of nonsense. most of us are using standalone server products.

      this use case calls for either centralized storage (s3 bucket) or access mechanism(all them vpns) to distributed channels (ala plex)… but friends dont let friends use plex.

      im curious about ipfs as distributed file systems sound like a new kink i should have

      • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        11 months ago

        but friends dont let friends use plex.

        I would love to get rid of Plex, but jellyfin failed the spouse test last summer and it never really liked my GDrive mount

        Plus, Plex clients are everywhere, so it’s all but guaranteed that whoever I decide to onboard is going to have something compatible. I’ve even had early smart TV’s from like 2013 with that weird Yahoo app store thing that had a Plex app that still worked even when the Netflix app didn’t lolol

        • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          Funnily enough, my wife is the only person who likes jellyfin. It works perfectly for her. Everyone else? I’ve never had it work even once. And I have no damn idea why.

        • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
          21·
          11 months ago

          ha, i feel ya on the spouse. in the house i use local kodi on pis with a shared backend. that same source runs jellyin for the kids/outside the house

          ive had the same interface for the wife on kodi/xbmc for probably 10 years

          ive found kodi+jellyfin fits all my use cases

      • density@kbin.social
        61·
        11 months ago

        tell me why i shouldn’t use plex as I’m always tempted by it whenever these threads come up and everyone who uses it is so happy.

        But free/libre is so much more delicious.

        But don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

          • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            I’m surprised the client doesn’t support switching between servers. When I had jellyfin running I exposed it through traefik to allow external playback. Figure it would make sense that you could just show multiple servers in the UI. Add several reverse proxied addresses and boom.

            • suntzu@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              Then I have multiple jellyfin servers in the app… That’s not what I want, I want a single mount where all the media of all nodes is accessible

            • theRealBassist@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              You definitely can. Idk why the commentor above you thinks its local only?

              I have two severs I swap between exactly like you describe.

  • zerodawn@leaf.danceEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Likely not the solution you’re looking for but a buddy and i link a folder via syncthing and anything added to one side shows up on the other.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    21·
    11 months ago

    Seems to me the easiest solution would be each host a replica. Now that you can get 8TB for something like a hundred bucks this would be both faster and more redundant if one would fail

  • planish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.

    Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?

    I wouldn’t really recommend IPFS for this. It’s tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn’t really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you’d have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you’d have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won’t do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
    Plex Brand of media server package
    VPN Virtual Private Network

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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