Jellyfin

What is Jellyfin?

Jellyfin lets you stream your own movies, TV shows, music and photos to any device. It is a fully free and open-source alternative to Plex and Emby with no premium tier, no tracking and no account required. You keep complete control of your library and your data.

Best for

People replacing Netflix or Plex with a private media server

Why choose Jellyfin

Jellyfin is the safest long-term home for a media library because nothing about it can be taken away. There is no company that can change the pricing model, no account that can be suspended, and no feature that can be moved behind a paywall — the project is a non-profit with no commercial tier to upsell you into. If you have spent years ripping your own discs or buying DRM-free files, this is the software that treats them as yours.

Replaces

• Plex
• Emby
• Netflix

Key features

• Movies, TV, music and photo libraries
• Transcoding with hardware acceleration
• Apps for TV, mobile and browser
• Live TV and DVR support

What to watch out for

The honest weakness is client polish. Plex's apps are smoother, its transcoding heuristics are smarter out of the box, and its remote-access story requires zero thought. With Jellyfin you will spend an evening on reverse-proxy and TLS settings before remote streaming works properly. Transcoding also punishes weak hardware — a cheap NAS with an Intel Celeron will struggle with more than one simultaneous 1080p stream unless it supports Quick Sync. If you want zero administration, this will frustrate you.

How to deploy

• Docker
• Linux packages
• Windows

Getting started

Start with the official Docker image and mount your media read-only — there is no reason for the server to write to your library. Put the config and metadata directories on fast local storage rather than the media volume, because Jellyfin does a lot of small-file reads while browsing. Before exposing anything to the internet, set up a reverse proxy with HTTPS; the built-in HTTP port should never face outward. Give it a few hours to finish the initial library scan and metadata fetch before judging the experience — the first scan is slow and everything feels broken until it completes.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 57,679
• Last code push: 2026-09-30
• Open issues: 719
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.