Emby

Emby is a personal media server, which has clients for many platforms. It is used to organize personal home media, as well as play back on other devices. There are a large amount of channels that are supported by the community, and can even be used with PVR and Tuner cards to provide TV streaming remotely.

Installation

Install the emby-server package.

Usage

Enable and start emby-server.service.

Access Emby through the browser by navigating to http://localhost:8096/

Write Permissions

Emby runs under the user and user group emby using systemd's DynamicUser feature. By default, Emby will have at most read permissions to your media files thanks to systemd's filesystem abstraction.

You might want to give emby write permissions and enable media deletion, local metadata saving, subtitle downloading and more.

You will need to create a dedicated group for your media files, or use one you already belong to, and give it access to your folders like so:

# create the media group
groupadd media

# optionally add your_user to the media group
usermod -aG media your_user

# give ownership of your media files to the media group
chgrp -R media /mnt/media_files

# make the files writeable to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type f -exec chmod 664 {} +

# make the directories writeable to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type d -exec chmod 775 {} +

# add the sticky group bit so that newly created directories belong to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type d -exec chmod g+s {} +

Then you can extend the systemd service by creating the following file:

/etc/systemd/system/emby-server.service.d/write-permissions.conf

[Service]
SupplementaryGroups=media
ReadWritePaths=/mnt/media_files
UMask=0002

This will add the emby user to the media group, and enable write permission to the /mnt/media_files directory through systemd. Rinse and repeat for any additional media folders you might have.