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Setting up Media Sharing

Lucas Holt edited this page Aug 22, 2022 · 1 revision

MidnightBSD includes several ports to setup media sharing on your local network. Emby and Plex are both available in mports.

We recommend emby for several reasons including it's wide cross platform support on clients.

It's recommend to use MidnightBSD for amd64/x86_64 rather than the 32bit release for this project.

We also recommend setting aside a fair amount of disk space, preferably on a ZFS pool for your media collection. You'll likely want to setup samba or nfs to access it from other machines to add files.

Emby

Install Emby mport install emby-server

or

cd /usr/mports/multimedia/emby-server; make install clean

Post Install for Emby To automatically start Emby Server at boot time:

sysrc emby_server_enable="YES"

To then manually start Emby Server without rebooting:

service emby-server start

Once started, visit the following webpage to configure:

http://localhost:8096/

You can also access it from the network using the systems IP address. It's recommended to use a static IP or setup your dhcp server to always serve the same IP for client use.

Once configured, you can access it from your browser on any machine in the network. It is picky about browsers so we recommend using Firefox, Chrome, or Gnome Web (epiphany). Midori will not work.

We currently use it from Apple TV, windows, mac and MidnightBSD clients.

If you setup an emby account, you may also be able to access it from remote locations.

Finally, DO NOT BUY a subscription for emby. They have great features, but the registration code is very buggy on non Win/Mac/Linux environments and will not work properly. You can if you wish to support the project of course, but it does not actually work. If anyone has a way to fix this, we'd love to get it working. Please let us know or open a PR on github.

Plex

Install Plex mport install plexmediaserver

or

cd /usr/mports/multimedia/plexmediaserver

Post Install multimedia/plexmediaserver includes an RC script:

%%PREFIX%%/etc/rc.d/plexmediaserver

TO START PLEXMEDIASERVER ON BOOT:

sysrc plexmediaserver_enable=YES

START MANUALLY:

service plexmediaserver start

Once started, visit the following to configure:

http://localhost:32400/web