Setting up Jinzora Media Server
I’m trying out Jinzora as a better alternative to ampache. Most of the setup was very easy, as Jinzora2 uses a web based installer. There were a few things i had to do to make it work 100%, which i will talk about later.
Major installation steps (with points of caution included)
- Get the package. I’m using Jinzora 2.7.5 Obsidian
- Extract the package files. Move the extracted dir to your web dir (/var/www)
- IMPORTANT:
- Make sure the installation dir (in my case ‘jinzora2’) is owned by same user which is used to run your web server.
- Run the provided configure.sh script which sets up required file permissions.
# on debian based systems sudo chown -R www-data:www-data jinzora2
- Point you web browser to the installation dir. In my case, I have set the docroot for the subdomain to be the installation dir. After this simply follow the web based wizard which sets up admin account, database tables and imports your media.
- Delete the ‘install’ sub directory as prompted by jinzaro.
Important Configuration
- Album Art: In case your album art is not showing up, make sure that you have GD2 library installed for php. Its just a matter of apt-get install php5-gd, restarting apache and album arts should show just fine.
- Downsampling:
- Go to Admin tools -> System Tools -> Settings Manager -> Main Setting -> Resampling
- Make sure path to lame binary is correct. If you have not installed lame yet, please do so now. I had to fix paths to lame and other binaries, as in debian based systems, lame is located at /usr/bin/lame
- Set the default resampling rate. I prefer 44kbps personally
- Note: Jinzaro has a clever $no_resample_subnets variable in settings.php which tell jinzaro not to resample for local requests.
- Embedded Players:
- For music streaming, i chose fsmp3 player. Its has the cleanest interface while still being the one with most options.
- For video streaming, has to be qt player. Streaming video is pretty good with no jerks or buffer stops.
Have fun ….