Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into a Netflix-Style Media Server (Jellyfin + Cloudflare)

How I built a personal streaming platform using Jellyfin, Docker, and Cloudflare — and fixed all the weird issues along the way.

Introduction

I’ve always wanted to build my own “mini data center” — something affordable, powerful, and actually useful. So, when I finally sat down with my Raspberry Pi 4, a 16GB SD card, and a 300GB external hard drive full of movies, I thought: “Why not make my own Netflix?” And not just locally — I wanted something I could access from anywhere. So this guide takes you through the exact process I used, including:

• - Installing Docker + Portainer
• - Mounting my external hard drive
• - Fixing the infamous Jellyfin playback error
• - Deploying Jellyfin
• - Making it accessible globally via Cloudflare Tunnel
• - Solving all the permission issues that nobody warns you about

If you follow this guide, you’ll have a fully working, cloud-accessible Netflix-style server running on a tiny Raspberry Pi. Let’s begin.

What You Need

Here’s my setup:

• - Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB RAM)
• - 16GB microSD card
• - External hard drive (NTFS formatted — this will matter later!)
• - Docker & Portainer installed
• - Cloudflare account (free)
• - Domain name (comonhq.com in my case)

** Everything in this tutorial costs basically zero dollars.**

Installing Docker & Portainer

To make life easy, I deployed Jellyfin using Docker.

# Install Docker:
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh [Add your Pi user to the docker group]: sudo usermod -aG docker $USER 

# Install Portainer:
docker volume create portainer_data

docker run -d \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  -p 9443:9443 \
  --name portainer \
  --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v portainer_data:/data \
  portainer/portainer-ce:latest

Now you can access Portainer at: https://your-pi-ip:9443Docker makes everything easier.

Plugging in the External Drive (Where My Problems Began)

My external hard drive had all my movies, so I plugged it into the Pi and ran:

lsblk

It showed up as /dev/sda1. I mounted it like this:

sudo mkdir -p /media/movies
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/movies

I could even see all my movies:

John Wick (2014).mp4
Moonfall (2022).mkv
The Martian (2015).mp4

Everything seemed fine…... BUT playback in Jellyfin failed. And that’s when I realized the real problem.

Fixing the Jellyfin Playback Error (The Hidden NTFS Issue)

When I installed Jellyfin, I could browse the movie list — but playing any movie gave this error:

Playback failed due to a fatal player error.

This was happening even before I exposed Jellyfin publicly. So it wasn’t Cloudflare. It wasn’t Jellyfin. It was the drive.

##❗THE CAUSE My external drive was NTFS (Windows format) and the Pi mounted it with root-only permissions. Meaning: Jellyfin could see the files, but not read them. Huge difference. To confirm:

ls -ld /media/movies

It showed something like:

drwx------  root root  /media/movies

Yeah… Jellyfin had zero access.

✅ THE FIX

Install NTFS support:

sudo apt install ntfs-3g

Unmount the drive:

sudo umount /media/movies

Remount with proper permissions:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=022 /dev/sda1 /media/movies

Now check permissions:

ls -ld /media/movies

Should look like:

drwxr-xr-x  comon comon /media/movies

🎉 Result

JELLYFIN PLAYBACK WORKS! This was the biggest issue of the entire project — once the drive was readable, everything else worked flawlessly.

Deploying Jellyfin with Docker Compose

Here’s the Docker Compose file I used:

version: "3.8"
services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - /media/movies:/media/movies
      - /opt/jellyfin/config:/config
      - /opt/jellyfin/cache:/cache
    restart: unless-stopped

Run it (if you are running it directly from the CLI):

docker compose up -d

In my case, I was running it through Portainer, so I just restarted it

Jellyfin becomes available at: http://your-pi-ip:8096

Add your media library:

• Go to Dashboard → Libraries → Add
• Select “Movies”
• Set the path to /media/movies

Your movies should instantly appear.

Your Pi will now Direct Play files, which is more stable.

Making Jellyfin Accessible Globally Using Cloudflare Tunnel

Cloudflare Tunnel allows you to expose Jellyfin securely without port forwarding. Install cloudflared:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/releases/latest/download/cloudflared-linux-arm64.deb -o cloudflared.deb
sudo dpkg -i cloudflared.deb
rm cloudflared.deb

Login:

cloudflared tunnel login

Create tunnel:

cloudflared tunnel create jellyfin-tunnel

Create config file:

sudo nano /etc/cloudflared/config.yml

# Add this:
tunnel: <YOUR_TUNNEL_ID>
credentials-file: /etc/cloudflared/<YOUR_TUNNEL_ID>.json

ingress:
  - hostname: jellyfin.<your-domain>
    service: http://localhost:8096
  - service: http_status:404

The bug you will likely face (I faced it too):

#Cloudflare saves credentials in:
/home/youruser/.cloudflared/

#But cloudflared expects it in:
/etc/cloudflared/

# Thw Fix:
sudo mv ~/.cloudflared/*.json /etc/cloudflared/
sudo chown root:root /etc/cloudflared/*.json

Start service:

sudo cloudflared service install
sudo systemctl start cloudflared

Now visit: https://jellyfin.yourdomain.com (in my case - https://jellyfin.comonhq.com) You’ll see Jellyfin globally, securely, and with HTTPS.

Now only you (and whoever you allow) can stream.

Final Thoughts

Turning my Raspberry Pi into a Netflix-style media server was one of the most fun and useful projects I’ve done this year.

I learned:

• - NTFS permissions matter more than you think
• - Docker makes Jellyfin deployment incredibly simple
• - Cloudflare Tunnel is magic
• - The Raspberry Pi is still one of the most powerful small computers for home labs

And now I have a personal media server, accessible from home, work, or anywhere in the world. If you build this too, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.