Jellyfin: The Free and Open Source alternative to Plex

Introduction

Jellyfin is a free and open source media server that allows you to collect, manage and stream your media from your server to any device. It supports Movies, TV Shows, Music, Books and Photos. It is predominantly known for movies and TV shows and many people who are hosting it already for movies and TV shows also like to use it for their music. It can automatically fetch metadata for your movies and TV shows, subtitles (using a plugin) and provides a structured way to organize and stream your media. In this article, I will show you how to set up Jellyfin on your own device or on a VPS. I’ll be using DigitalOcean as my cloud provider.

Background

This article is being written on the backdrop of a 300% increase in the price of the Lifetime Plex Pass. This prompted many users to look for alternatives to Plex who may be considering buying the lifetime pass. Jellyfin serves as the perfect alternative to Plex. It has no cost associated to it and also provides many benefits and features that are locked behind a paywall in Plex.

Why Jellyfin is a better choice than Plex

There are several reasons that I consider Jellyfin to be a superior offering to Plex. They are listed below:

Offline Download

On the free tier, Plex does now allow the client devices connected to it to download the media for offline use. This is a big deal breaker for many users who want to download their media offline to watch/listen to when an internet connection isn’t available.

Hardware Acceleration

It isn’t possible to stream or encode media in Plex with hardware video acceleration on the free tier. This makes it such that if the server isn’t powerful enough (common when running on old hardware or a VPS) and the client requires the video to be encoded in a different codec while streaming, the standard CPU acceleration must be able to keep up with the video playback or the stream buffers continuosly as the server is unable to keep up. This also makes it so that the CPU is running at 100% capacity encoding the video and throttles other processes on the machine.

Authentication

Plex Media Server requires you to create a Plex account on their own authentication servers and the same goes for any users for your media server. This not only leaves you dependent on Plex and their servers but also gives you less control and permissions for the users of your server.

Installation

This section will discuss the installation of the Jellyfin server. There are several ways to install Jellyfin on different platforms. There are installers and archives for installation on Windows and MacOS. It can also be installed on several Linux distributions. You can see the complete list of downloads here. I will be installing Jellyfin in a container using Docker Compose.

Selecting the Image

There are several container images available for Jellyfin. There’s the official container image provided by Jellyfin. There’s also an image created by hotio.dev.

My preferred image though is by LinuxServer who maintain community images for a wide variety of applications. I prefer it due to their well documented images and proper permissions support with environment variables.

Directory Structure

mkdir -p ~/services/jellyfin
cd jellyfin

Compose

1
---
2
services:
3
  jellyfin:
4
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
5
    container_name: jellyfin
6
    environment:
7
      - PUID=1000
8
      - PGID=1000
9
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
10
    volumes:
11
      - /opt/jellyfin/library:/config
12
      - /media/tvseries:/data/tvshows
13
      - /media/movies:/data/movies
14
    ports:
15
      - 8096:8096
16
      - 8920:8920 #optional
17
      - 7359:7359/udp #optional
18
      - 1900:1900/udp #optional
19
    restart: unless-stopped

Starting the container

docker compose up -d

Web Interface

The web interface should now be accessible at http://localhost:8096.

You can then continue setting up your server. You will be required to name your server, create an administrator account, add your media library and you will be good to go. Jellyfin automatically fetches the metadata for your media from the internet.

Plugins

Jellyfin can also be extended by using plugins. One of the most popular plugins allows you to download and manage subtitles for your media from within Jellyfin.

Client Applications

Jellyfin has many official client applications along with unofficial clients that aim to provide a better user interface or functionality than the official clients. Here’s a list of my recommended Jellyfin client programs for each platform:

- Android:

Findroid is considered the best client application for Android. It is built with Material Design 3 and available on the Google Play Store and F-Droid

- iOS/iPadOS

Swiftin is an open source frontend built for iOS and tvOS with a beautiful interface.

- Windows/MacOS/Linux

Fladder is a cross platform frontend for Jellyfin built on Flutter. It is supported on all three major desktop platforms, Android TV and can also be run in a container.

Conclusion

This was a general introduction to Jellyfin, its features and extensibility. I hope this guide was useful to you. If you want me to write an article on creating a full media stack with Jellyfin, let me know in the comments. You may also check out my article on Grimmory, which is a dedicated book server.

Thanks for reading. Goodbye.