I didn’t like Kodi due to the unpleasant controls, especially on Android, so I decided to try out Jellyfin. It was really easy to get working, and I like it a lot more than Kodi, but I started to have problems after the first time restarting my computer.

I store my media on an external LUKS encrypted hard drive. Because of that, for some reason, Jellyfin’s permission to access the drive go away after a reboot. That means something like chgrp -R jellyfin /media/username does work, but it stops working after I restart my computer and unlock the disk.

I tried modifying the /etc/fstab file without really knowing what I was doing, and almost bricked the system. Thank goodness I’m running an atomic distro (Fedora Silverblue), I was able to recover pretty quickly.

How do I give Jellyfin permanent access to my hard drive?

Solution:

1. Install GNOME Disks
2. Open GNOME Disks
3. On the left, click on the drive storing your media
4. Click “Unlock selected encrypted partition” (the padlock icon)
5. Enter your password
6. Click “Unlock”
7. Select the LUKS partition
8. Click “Additional partition options” (the gear icon)
9. Click “Edit Encryption Options…”
10. Enter your admin password
11. Click “Authenticate”
12. Disable “User Session Defaults”
13. Select “Unlock at system startup”
14. Enter the encryption password for your drive in the “Passphrase” field
15. Click “Ok”
16. Select the decrypted Ext4 partition
17. Click “Additional partition options” (the gear icon)
18. Click “Edit Mount Options…”
19. Disable “User Session Defaults”
20. Select “Mount at system startup”
21. Click “Ok”
22. Navigate to your Jellyfin Dashboard
23. Go to “Libraries”
24. Select “Add Media Library”
25. When configuring the folder, navigate to /mnt and then select the UUID that points to your mounted hard drive