Installation

Prepare your server

Prepare storage, permissions, networking, DNS and hardware acceleration before installing a private Finetic build.

12 min readUpdated 18 Jul 2026Publicly verified

Preparation checklist#

Choose a stable hostname and server address.
Mount movie and television storage at persistent paths.
Decide whether Finetic needs read-only or read/write media access.
Reserve SSD-backed space for the media cache.
Verify DNS and TLS for remote access.
Confirm that no existing service owns the intended HTTP port.
Record how the host itself is backed up.

Choose stable media paths#

Use mount points that survive reboot and do not depend on an interactive desktop session. Network storage should reconnect before Finetic starts. If a NAS is unavailable, Finetic should see an unavailable mount—not an empty directory that resembles mass deletion.

Recommended library shape:

Example

/media/
  movies/
    Film Title (2024)/
      Film Title (2024).mkv
      movie.nfo
      poster.jpg
  television/
    Show Title (2022)/
      Season 01/
        Show Title - S01E01 - Episode Title.mkv

This is guidance, not a hard requirement. Finetic uses probes, local metadata and matching rather than relying on one exact filename template.

Permissions#

Read-only access is sufficient for scanning and playback. Grant write access only if you explicitly want future workflows to alter adjacent metadata or artwork. The Finetic service account should not be an administrator and should not own unrelated host files.

Test permissions as the service identity, not as root. A folder visible to your shell may still be inaccessible to the running application.

Network and reverse proxy#

Use HTTPS for internet-facing access. Restrict management ports to trusted networks. The public hostname should route to Finetic without exposing PostgreSQL, internal health endpoints or the host's administration interface.

The proxy must allow long-lived event streams and large byte-range responses. A generic 30-second upstream timeout can interrupt a healthy playback session. Compression is useful for JSON and text, not already-compressed video segments.

Cache capacity#

Cache demand depends on concurrent playback, source bitrate and whether streams are remuxed or transcoded. Keep free space beyond the expected playback window. Finetic reports cache usage and prunes replaceable assets, but no application can manufacture disk space after the host is full.

Hardware acceleration#

Expose the relevant device nodes to the Finetic service and install the host driver required by the backend. Verification belongs in Playback & Transcoding after setup. Do not assume that seeing a GPU name means tone mapping or every encoder works.

Final preflight#

Reboot the host once before installation. Confirm that media mounts, networking, DNS and storage permissions return without manual action. This catches more future reliability problems than a successful one-time scan.