I have setup Jellyfin a number of times on Raspberry Pis and other SBCs, and it is a piece of cake. In my case, I just followed the official instructions to add the Jellyfin repo the the apt...
I have setup Jellyfin a number of times on Raspberry Pis and other SBCs, and it is a piece of cake. In my case, I just followed the official instructions to add the Jellyfin repo the the apt sources list in Debian. It updates nicely with zero issues. Even on my low power boards it works great. I don’t do anything fancy, though, and I’m sure these little ARM CPUs would not be able to handle much transcoding and all that. But even so, I stream HD video on it all the time to my phone no problem!
My only gripe is that Jellyfin doesn’t use file metadata to organize the library. It expects a certain folder structure, which is not unreasonable, but I have been too lazy to manually reorganize my entire library of music. So far I have dealt with that on a need-to-listen basis.
Anyway, based on your description I am sure it would work great for you. Out of all the services I have hosted over the years, Jellyfin is probably the easiest to setup and maintain, and if my little Raspberry Pis can manage in, I’m sure your laptop could! Plus, you get bonus points for reusing old hardware! :)
So Jellyfin's preferred filename is Movie Name (Year) If it's not exactly that, it will still work. It will search the file name in themoviedb to find data so as long as the filename is accurate...
So Jellyfin's preferred filename is
Movie Name (Year)
If it's not exactly that, it will still work. It will search the file name in themoviedb to find data so as long as the filename is accurate enough to find data it should work.
That themoviedb lookup will find the IMDB ID which Jellyfin will use as the first choice for looking up subtitles in the open subtitles plugin. If it wasn't able to find it by IMDB ID then it will to searching open subtitles by the name. Open subtitles search seems perfectly able to find subtitles by e.g. "The Matrix (1999)"
I specifically stopped using Jellyfin and moved back to Plex because Jellyfin (on Roku, at least) could never properly sync subtitles. Sometimes it would be OK when a movie or show started, but if...
I specifically stopped using Jellyfin and moved back to Plex because Jellyfin (on Roku, at least) could never properly sync subtitles. Sometimes it would be OK when a movie or show started, but if I ever had to stop and resume they would be out of sync by several seconds and there was no way to fix it. It meant I always had to switch from the Roku to my Chromecast, which didn't have that problem.
May not be an issue for you, depending on how you plan to watch, but might be something to look out for in the clients you plan to watch with.
Hmm, I have never thought about how it handles subtitles actually. It has always just worked for me. All my subtitles are in the same folder and have the same name as the video file. Most of them...
one thing that worried me while reading the documentation is subtitles. In my experience subtitle plugins rely on the filename to find subs for that release, so if I standardize the names of the movie files then how will the plugin find the subtitles for me?
Hmm, I have never thought about how it handles subtitles actually. It has always just worked for me. All my subtitles are in the same folder and have the same name as the video file. Most of them were acquired on the high seas. My guess is that your existing library would just work with Jellyfin unless you had a really bespoke folder structure like: FunnyFilmz/lol/2022/3stars/FunnyMovie1/vid.mkv etc. It is easy enough to setup that you could give it a go and see what happens.
It's terrible! This dates back to the shared open source Emby codebase. I recently decided to go with Emby instead of Jellyfin for a number of reasons, and have been modifying it heavily to suit...
It expects a certain folder structure, which is not unreasonable
It's terrible! This dates back to the shared open source Emby codebase. I recently decided to go with Emby instead of Jellyfin for a number of reasons, and have been modifying it heavily to suit my needs. The folder structure thing immediately jumped out as a problem I might want to fix with a plugin (by immediately I mean as soon as the server misattributed all sorts of things in silly ways and there was no way to fix them), but after analyzing the source code this system is really deeply integrated into the whole thing.
It comes down to how a "Video" is deemed to be an "Episode" and a "Folder" containing videos is deemed to be a "Series" or a "Season" (likewise for audio). The rules are hardcoded for each library type, and the library types are hardcoded as well. Now you might tell me I should have gone with Jellyfin instead and just fixed it for good, but Jellyfin had more work that needed to be done compared to Emby, and I only have so much time unfortunately...
If your CPU is an Intel one, you very likely have hardware acceleration available to you through the integrated GPU and it's actually very good (maybe the best option for hardware accel TBH). I...
If your CPU is an Intel one, you very likely have hardware acceleration available to you through the integrated GPU and it's actually very good (maybe the best option for hardware accel TBH). I haven't had to set up Jellyfin in a year or two, so it could be much better now, but I had some issues with getting hardware acceleration to work. To be fair, I had to pass the GPU from the host machine into a VM, so that probably made it harder.
It did end up working in the end. Outside of that, Jellyfin is about as easy to set up. The UI is worse and you'll need to spend a little more time reading before you click things, but overall I've been happy using it. I would recommend trying Jellyfin, and if you get stuck for too long, switch to Plex and try again in a couple years.
This is weird for me to read because I tried setting up plex a while back and bounced off of it because I didn't feel like I had the control I wanted. I tried jellyfin a couple months later and...
This is weird for me to read because I tried setting up plex a while back and bounced off of it because I didn't feel like I had the control I wanted. I tried jellyfin a couple months later and now I'm over a year into using it and couldn't be happier.
I typically handle metadata through tiny media manager though so maybe that's the difference. Jellyfin just has so many plugins and skins for whatever I want to do. I'm sure plex has similar functionality but it felt so much more daunting to get going with it.
I'm sure I would run into the same issues you did if I wanted to do any customizing. For my use case, Plex (and Jellyfin) was great at recognizing the movie/tv series off of the filename. There...
I'm sure I would run into the same issues you did if I wanted to do any customizing. For my use case, Plex (and Jellyfin) was great at recognizing the movie/tv series off of the filename. There were only 2 instances where Plex wasn't great, and both had to do with a disagreement in whether the episode was a 2-parter or not.
I've been a Plex Pass holder for a few years now. If Plex didn't have the external network dependency, I would still be using it because their apps are just much more polished that Jellyfin's. These days, I use Infuse as the frontend, but if Swiftfin got better maybe I could drop that subscription.
That's disappointing about the apps because the Plex Client on multiple platforms is easily and by far the buggiest piece of software I use on a regular basis.
That's disappointing about the apps because the Plex Client on multiple platforms is easily and by far the buggiest piece of software I use on a regular basis.
Yep, this Intel page lists it as having it, but beware that Intel improved Quick Sync over time with processors. I was reading in this forum post that the early versions of Quick Sync didn't have...
Yep, this Intel page lists it as having it, but beware that Intel improved Quick Sync over time with processors. I was reading in this forum post that the early versions of Quick Sync didn't have great quality, so it might not be a feature you end up wanting anyway. I'm unsure what the QS version your i5-4210U is like.
Since your devices are all staying in your network, you probably will never need or want transcoding anyway. The only cases where you would are if your devices are incompatible with the media formats, which is way less likely than it used to be, or if you're streaming outside your network and your upload speeds are poor.
I use Jellyfin in basically the most effort-free way - I installed the archlinux package, which runs it as a systemd service, with an embedded sqlite database, neither of which I needed to set up....
I use Jellyfin in basically the most effort-free way - I installed the archlinux package, which runs it as a systemd service, with an embedded sqlite database, neither of which I needed to set up. I haven't bothered with hardware accelerated video. I see it has a Windows installer which is probably analogous, but I can't vouch for it.
You can go crazy with docker and hardware acceleration and connecting it to a NAS and running it in Docker and so on, but you don't have to.
I use my desktop Windows machine as a Jellyfin server (media is stored on 1 hard drive, but the Windows install and Jellyfin are on a different one). I'm fairly tech savvy, but I will say setting...
I use my desktop Windows machine as a Jellyfin server (media is stored on 1 hard drive, but the Windows install and Jellyfin are on a different one). I'm fairly tech savvy, but I will say setting it all up was incredibly easy - installed Jellyfin on the computer, pointed it to the folders where my videos are stored, and off it went to catalog everything, tag it, find pictures and descriptions. Once that was done, I installed the Jellyfin Roku app, and it automatically found the server (I had to do a little fiddling with my VPN settings, but if you don't have that, it won't affect you).
I can't comment on ongoing maintenance, since I've only been using it for a month or so, but I haven't had to touch a thing - it's all a GUI, and is very easy to navigate.
I am in the same boat as you. Media on one drive, install on another, Roku app on TV. However, my experience after install was much different. It only got about half of my media right, while Plex...
I am in the same boat as you. Media on one drive, install on another, Roku app on TV.
However, my experience after install was much different. It only got about half of my media right, while Plex was closer to 90%, and playback on Roku was atrocious with many things flat out refusing to play, crashes mid stream when it did.
Jellyfin is just about as usable as Plex. It’s easy to set up and if you can manage Plex, you can manage Jellyfin. They require about the same level of maintenance, i.e., very little. Just name...
Jellyfin is just about as usable as Plex. It’s easy to set up and if you can manage Plex, you can manage Jellyfin. They require about the same level of maintenance, i.e., very little. Just name the files right and keep the Docker updated.
The only thing I’d note is that Jellyfin doesn’t provide easy remote access like Plex does. You have to handle that part yourself.
Not at all. That’s just one way to get it running. You can also just run it as a program. They have native, ready to go installers for just about every major OS.
Not at all. That’s just one way to get it running. You can also just run it as a program. They have native, ready to go installers for just about every major OS.
FWIW if you're re-setting up an old computer as a media server I think it's worth it to fiddle with docker, probably through Unraid. It's pretty simple to get up and running and once it is it...
FWIW if you're re-setting up an old computer as a media server I think it's worth it to fiddle with docker, probably through Unraid.
It's pretty simple to get up and running and once it is it makes everything more portable and simple to update. Upgrading to new hardware for me was literally moving over the USB stick that had Unraid on it and transferring hard drives.
This seems to be a very unpopular opinion these days, but I use Emby. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby that was created when Emby started to make a few features premium only. The primary feature that's...
This seems to be a very unpopular opinion these days, but I use Emby. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby that was created when Emby started to make a few features premium only.
The primary feature that's paid is live TV streaming capability. But there is a non-zero cost to access TV guide data, which is provided seamlessly as part of that premium fee. If you aren't doing anything with live TV, you likely don't need to even think about Premium though. (If you do, it's $5/mo or they have a lifetime/one-time option, and it often goes on sale during black Friday. I don't mind paying monthly because the main dev is very active and deserves at least a coffee a month for keeping up with it.)
I'm not sure how Jellyfin is these days, but for a long while Emby was more stable. There also weren't dedicated Jellyfin clients for Roku and the like, but from the comments here it sounds like that may have changed.
TL;DR: consider Emby as well, regardless of the drama.
I use Jellyfin. My main reason that I picked Jellyfin over Plex are: standalone, no registration needed, no dependency on third party (web/server) open source Plex didn't start on boot with my...
I use Jellyfin. My main reason that I picked Jellyfin over Plex are:
standalone, no registration needed, no dependency on third party (web/server)
open source
Plex didn't start on boot with my system (although it should) and I didn't want to investigate while Jellyfin was already running fine
Main disadvanatges of Jellyfin:
no easy user change in Kodi (that I use on my TVs at home), hence no porn on TVs because kids in the house; Plex is much better in this but it hasother drawbacks
I rip my DVDs and Blu rays to my server, this is the absolutely main objective of the server. I also rip my audio CDs and I record various things from TV (that I get through DVB-T2 antenna and tune on multiple Raspberry Pis with TV HATs).
Since I rip my movies myself I have subtitles and multiple languages encoded already in the file. I use featurettes and extras and so on, you have to stick to the folder structure. I also get music clips as extras sometimes which I have in music clips library on Jellyfin.
Setup was VERY easy. I believe I have just installed it, started it, input my first user, set folders with media and let it do the work (search through them and later generate thumbnails etc.). Scraper is not that good though, it often finds newest installment in movie series instead of the right one (say Fast and Furious and it finds the tenth movie in series), fixing that is quite easy - just go to IMDB.com, find the movie and copy the ID of it to Jellyfin and let it download the right metadata. I'd say 10% of movies were scraped badly. I don't include release year in my filenames though, this may be the part o my problem.
Overall I never had any troubles with the server, it runs perfectly fine without any need of manual intervention since I got it running in... 2022, I believe.
I also have my old GTX 750 in the server so it can encode on the fly if I need be - ie. I want lower bitrate (when I stream over VPN somewhere remote from home).
To counter many of the responses here, I switched from Jellyfin to Plex. I found the quality of Plex and its clients to be much higher. Typically things Just Work™ with Plex whereas I always found...
To counter many of the responses here, I switched from Jellyfin to Plex. I found the quality of Plex and its clients to be much higher. Typically things Just Work™ with Plex whereas I always found myself fiddling with Jellyfin or trying to work around outdated/unsupported clients.
I feel confident setting up Plex on my parent’s TV or my partner’s device and knowing they’ll have a Netflix-like experience with subtitles et al.
I had numerous issues with Jellyfin including losing state, inability to rewind on certain clients, transcoding failures, streaming failures, and on and on.
And finally Plexamp is second to none. I prefer it to Spotify or Apple Music.
I found Jellyfin fairly straightforward to set up, no matter which route you chose to install it, be it through the official installer, APT, or through docker. Setting it up through the official...
I found Jellyfin fairly straightforward to set up, no matter which route you chose to install it, be it through the official installer, APT, or through docker. Setting it up through the official installer was the simplest. Just click next, next, next, follow the on-screen prompts, and you're on your way. Installing it through APT was much the same. I did run into some issues while installing it on my Ubuntu system but they were simple to fix. Setting it up through Docker also requires some Docker knowledge but again isn't too difficult to set up. There are many useful guides online (though some may be outdated) and installing it through Docker makes it easier to combine it with other software like the *arr programs or qBitTorrent.
I run a Jellyfin server on a Pi 4. Been working great for 3ish years now. I even access it over VPN when I travel. But I only use Jellyfin for music. However, if all you want is to access TV shows...
I run a Jellyfin server on a Pi 4. Been working great for 3ish years now. I even access it over VPN when I travel. But I only use Jellyfin for music.
However, if all you want is to access TV shows and movies over your network, consider hooking the Pi straight up to a TV with Kodi. I have a Pi 5 hooked up to my TV running Kodi, accessing movies and TV shows over samba, and it works great. Hardest part is figuring out the samba address in Kodi (figure it out on another device first).
I haven't set it up on Linux so I can't help you there I'm afraid but I've got a Jellyfin server set up on a Windows machine and it's been great. Currently got a 4TB drive used for movies and a...
I haven't set it up on Linux so I can't help you there I'm afraid but I've got a Jellyfin server set up on a Windows machine and it's been great. Currently got a 4TB drive used for movies and a 6TB for TV shows and been using it for around 9 months so far.
There's plenty of community modules to reskin Jellyfin so it looks like Plex or Netflix etc. along with community modules to add additional functionality.
We've currently got it set up with two profiles, one for me and my wife and a second for our daughter which is limited to films rated PG (Parental Guidance in the UK).
I've had to update it a couple times and it's been fairly pain free. There was the last time I updated it looked like it had lost all images for all films and TV shows, whether that be box images, logos, background images, etc. but a simple refresh of metadata on the library fixed it.
If it’s direct playing a file the subtitle timing is handled by the client? I use infuse as client and have no issues adjusting the occasional out of sync subtitle. Infuse will download subtitles...
If it’s direct playing a file the subtitle timing is handled by the client? I use infuse as client and have no issues adjusting the occasional out of sync subtitle. Infuse will download subtitles if there aren’t any available “locally.”
And a note about renaming files/folders: why not set up the *arr suite so you can leave files where they are, named as they are, and just hard link to the jellyfin media directory? Edit: This would likely mean moving into docker world, but Trash Guides is a decent enough guide for most I’d think?
Delayed processing. This is going on Debian stable? Just use docker. I’ll send you a compose file. All you need to do is change the user/group, directory paths, save it, and docker compose up -d....
Delayed processing. This is going on Debian stable? Just use docker.
I’ll send you a compose file.
All you need to do is change the user/group, directory paths, save it, and docker compose up -d. If you end up not liking jellyfin just delete the container.
My question would be what's wrong with using Kodi? I've been using Kodi (via OSMC recently on their excellent Vero hardware) for many many years and it's been totally fine for me. On Debian it's...
My question would be what's wrong with using Kodi?
I've been using Kodi (via OSMC recently on their excellent Vero hardware) for many many years and it's been totally fine for me. On Debian it's as simple as apt install kodi (once you have the deb-multimedia repo set up, but same for all multimedia stuff on debian)
I believe Plex shares some code with Kodi from long ago but I could be wrong about that.
Correct me if this has changed, but Kodi is an HTPC solution where you'd run Kodi on a computer and then plug that into a TV. Jellyfin/Plex/Emby are all server/client solutions where you have them...
Correct me if this has changed, but Kodi is an HTPC solution where you'd run Kodi on a computer and then plug that into a TV. Jellyfin/Plex/Emby are all server/client solutions where you have them running on one computer and then any other devices on the network can access media.
I haven't used Kodi in a very long time and even when I did it was briefly, but I believe Kodi is more like a client that also does some of the server functions that Plex and the like do in terms...
I haven't used Kodi in a very long time and even when I did it was briefly, but I believe Kodi is more like a client that also does some of the server functions that Plex and the like do in terms of content management and organizing etc.
I looked in the wiki just to refresh my memory a little, you can see it does a lot of similar setup as you would do on the Plex server for library management.
Also in their FAQ
Can I use Kodi as a Media Server
Kodi does include a built in UPnP server that can stream Music and Video content from your Kodi library to other devices. It can also act as a UPnP client to receive content from other Servers on your local network.
Apart from the UPnP component, Kodi is not designed as a Server. Each viewing location will have a Kodi instance installed on the hardware attached to the AVR or TV at that location.
During normal use, Kodi accesses local content off your hard disk or from your local network storage via a File sharing protocol such as SMB.
I think that helps clarify that you could technically use it as a server, but it's not designed for it and they're really more like clients on each platform. And it is multi-platform, it doesn't just run on PC operating systems, it works on other operating systems as well, looking at their downloads page. That you can point Kodi to network storage allows you to use it as a client on other systems that themselves don't store the content you are trying to watch.
It does not appear to be as widely supported across as many platforms as Plex or Emby, so in that regard I'd say it's not exactly a good replacement for someone who is concerned about that, or for someone who is attempting to share content remotely with others easily.
I have setup Jellyfin a number of times on Raspberry Pis and other SBCs, and it is a piece of cake. In my case, I just followed the official instructions to add the Jellyfin repo the the apt sources list in Debian. It updates nicely with zero issues. Even on my low power boards it works great. I don’t do anything fancy, though, and I’m sure these little ARM CPUs would not be able to handle much transcoding and all that. But even so, I stream HD video on it all the time to my phone no problem!
My only gripe is that Jellyfin doesn’t use file metadata to organize the library. It expects a certain folder structure, which is not unreasonable, but I have been too lazy to manually reorganize my entire library of music. So far I have dealt with that on a need-to-listen basis.
Anyway, based on your description I am sure it would work great for you. Out of all the services I have hosted over the years, Jellyfin is probably the easiest to setup and maintain, and if my little Raspberry Pis can manage in, I’m sure your laptop could! Plus, you get bonus points for reusing old hardware! :)
So Jellyfin's preferred filename is
Movie Name (Year)If it's not exactly that, it will still work. It will search the file name in themoviedb to find data so as long as the filename is accurate enough to find data it should work.
That themoviedb lookup will find the IMDB ID which Jellyfin will use as the first choice for looking up subtitles in the open subtitles plugin. If it wasn't able to find it by IMDB ID then it will to searching open subtitles by the name. Open subtitles search seems perfectly able to find subtitles by e.g. "The Matrix (1999)"
I specifically stopped using Jellyfin and moved back to Plex because Jellyfin (on Roku, at least) could never properly sync subtitles. Sometimes it would be OK when a movie or show started, but if I ever had to stop and resume they would be out of sync by several seconds and there was no way to fix it. It meant I always had to switch from the Roku to my Chromecast, which didn't have that problem.
May not be an issue for you, depending on how you plan to watch, but might be something to look out for in the clients you plan to watch with.
Hmm, I have never thought about how it handles subtitles actually. It has always just worked for me. All my subtitles are in the same folder and have the same name as the video file. Most of them were acquired on the high seas. My guess is that your existing library would just work with Jellyfin unless you had a really bespoke folder structure like:
FunnyFilmz/lol/2022/3stars/FunnyMovie1/vid.mkvetc. It is easy enough to setup that you could give it a go and see what happens.Oh wow, that’s good to know! Thanks for sharing!
It's terrible! This dates back to the shared open source Emby codebase. I recently decided to go with Emby instead of Jellyfin for a number of reasons, and have been modifying it heavily to suit my needs. The folder structure thing immediately jumped out as a problem I might want to fix with a plugin (by immediately I mean as soon as the server misattributed all sorts of things in silly ways and there was no way to fix them), but after analyzing the source code this system is really deeply integrated into the whole thing.
It comes down to how a "Video" is deemed to be an "Episode" and a "Folder" containing videos is deemed to be a "Series" or a "Season" (likewise for audio). The rules are hardcoded for each library type, and the library types are hardcoded as well. Now you might tell me I should have gone with Jellyfin instead and just fixed it for good, but Jellyfin had more work that needed to be done compared to Emby, and I only have so much time unfortunately...
If your CPU is an Intel one, you very likely have hardware acceleration available to you through the integrated GPU and it's actually very good (maybe the best option for hardware accel TBH). I haven't had to set up Jellyfin in a year or two, so it could be much better now, but I had some issues with getting hardware acceleration to work. To be fair, I had to pass the GPU from the host machine into a VM, so that probably made it harder.
It did end up working in the end. Outside of that, Jellyfin is about as easy to set up. The UI is worse and you'll need to spend a little more time reading before you click things, but overall I've been happy using it. I would recommend trying Jellyfin, and if you get stuck for too long, switch to Plex and try again in a couple years.
This is weird for me to read because I tried setting up plex a while back and bounced off of it because I didn't feel like I had the control I wanted. I tried jellyfin a couple months later and now I'm over a year into using it and couldn't be happier.
I typically handle metadata through tiny media manager though so maybe that's the difference. Jellyfin just has so many plugins and skins for whatever I want to do. I'm sure plex has similar functionality but it felt so much more daunting to get going with it.
I'm sure I would run into the same issues you did if I wanted to do any customizing. For my use case, Plex (and Jellyfin) was great at recognizing the movie/tv series off of the filename. There were only 2 instances where Plex wasn't great, and both had to do with a disagreement in whether the episode was a 2-parter or not.
I've been a Plex Pass holder for a few years now. If Plex didn't have the external network dependency, I would still be using it because their apps are just much more polished that Jellyfin's. These days, I use Infuse as the frontend, but if Swiftfin got better maybe I could drop that subscription.
That's disappointing about the apps because the Plex Client on multiple platforms is easily and by far the buggiest piece of software I use on a regular basis.
Yep, this Intel page lists it as having it, but beware that Intel improved Quick Sync over time with processors. I was reading in this forum post that the early versions of Quick Sync didn't have great quality, so it might not be a feature you end up wanting anyway. I'm unsure what the QS version your i5-4210U is like.
Since your devices are all staying in your network, you probably will never need or want transcoding anyway. The only cases where you would are if your devices are incompatible with the media formats, which is way less likely than it used to be, or if you're streaming outside your network and your upload speeds are poor.
The easiest way to check is
vdpauinfoandvainfohttps://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration#Verification
I use Jellyfin in basically the most effort-free way - I installed the archlinux package, which runs it as a systemd service, with an embedded sqlite database, neither of which I needed to set up. I haven't bothered with hardware accelerated video. I see it has a Windows installer which is probably analogous, but I can't vouch for it.
You can go crazy with docker and hardware acceleration and connecting it to a NAS and running it in Docker and so on, but you don't have to.
I use my desktop Windows machine as a Jellyfin server (media is stored on 1 hard drive, but the Windows install and Jellyfin are on a different one). I'm fairly tech savvy, but I will say setting it all up was incredibly easy - installed Jellyfin on the computer, pointed it to the folders where my videos are stored, and off it went to catalog everything, tag it, find pictures and descriptions. Once that was done, I installed the Jellyfin Roku app, and it automatically found the server (I had to do a little fiddling with my VPN settings, but if you don't have that, it won't affect you).
I can't comment on ongoing maintenance, since I've only been using it for a month or so, but I haven't had to touch a thing - it's all a GUI, and is very easy to navigate.
I am in the same boat as you. Media on one drive, install on another, Roku app on TV.
However, my experience after install was much different. It only got about half of my media right, while Plex was closer to 90%, and playback on Roku was atrocious with many things flat out refusing to play, crashes mid stream when it did.
Jellyfin is just about as usable as Plex. It’s easy to set up and if you can manage Plex, you can manage Jellyfin. They require about the same level of maintenance, i.e., very little. Just name the files right and keep the Docker updated.
The only thing I’d note is that Jellyfin doesn’t provide easy remote access like Plex does. You have to handle that part yourself.
It is not.
Not at all. That’s just one way to get it running. You can also just run it as a program. They have native, ready to go installers for just about every major OS.
FWIW if you're re-setting up an old computer as a media server I think it's worth it to fiddle with docker, probably through Unraid.
It's pretty simple to get up and running and once it is it makes everything more portable and simple to update. Upgrading to new hardware for me was literally moving over the USB stick that had Unraid on it and transferring hard drives.
This seems to be a very unpopular opinion these days, but I use Emby. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby that was created when Emby started to make a few features premium only.
The primary feature that's paid is live TV streaming capability. But there is a non-zero cost to access TV guide data, which is provided seamlessly as part of that premium fee. If you aren't doing anything with live TV, you likely don't need to even think about Premium though. (If you do, it's $5/mo or they have a lifetime/one-time option, and it often goes on sale during black Friday. I don't mind paying monthly because the main dev is very active and deserves at least a coffee a month for keeping up with it.)
I'm not sure how Jellyfin is these days, but for a long while Emby was more stable. There also weren't dedicated Jellyfin clients for Roku and the like, but from the comments here it sounds like that may have changed.
TL;DR: consider Emby as well, regardless of the drama.
I use Jellyfin. My main reason that I picked Jellyfin over Plex are:
Main disadvanatges of Jellyfin:
I rip my DVDs and Blu rays to my server, this is the absolutely main objective of the server. I also rip my audio CDs and I record various things from TV (that I get through DVB-T2 antenna and tune on multiple Raspberry Pis with TV HATs).
Since I rip my movies myself I have subtitles and multiple languages encoded already in the file. I use featurettes and extras and so on, you have to stick to the folder structure. I also get music clips as extras sometimes which I have in music clips library on Jellyfin.
Setup was VERY easy. I believe I have just installed it, started it, input my first user, set folders with media and let it do the work (search through them and later generate thumbnails etc.). Scraper is not that good though, it often finds newest installment in movie series instead of the right one (say Fast and Furious and it finds the tenth movie in series), fixing that is quite easy - just go to IMDB.com, find the movie and copy the ID of it to Jellyfin and let it download the right metadata. I'd say 10% of movies were scraped badly. I don't include release year in my filenames though, this may be the part o my problem.
Overall I never had any troubles with the server, it runs perfectly fine without any need of manual intervention since I got it running in... 2022, I believe.
I also have my old GTX 750 in the server so it can encode on the fly if I need be - ie. I want lower bitrate (when I stream over VPN somewhere remote from home).
To counter many of the responses here, I switched from Jellyfin to Plex. I found the quality of Plex and its clients to be much higher. Typically things Just Work™ with Plex whereas I always found myself fiddling with Jellyfin or trying to work around outdated/unsupported clients.
I feel confident setting up Plex on my parent’s TV or my partner’s device and knowing they’ll have a Netflix-like experience with subtitles et al.
I had numerous issues with Jellyfin including losing state, inability to rewind on certain clients, transcoding failures, streaming failures, and on and on.
And finally Plexamp is second to none. I prefer it to Spotify or Apple Music.
I found Jellyfin fairly straightforward to set up, no matter which route you chose to install it, be it through the official installer, APT, or through docker. Setting it up through the official installer was the simplest. Just click next, next, next, follow the on-screen prompts, and you're on your way. Installing it through APT was much the same. I did run into some issues while installing it on my Ubuntu system but they were simple to fix. Setting it up through Docker also requires some Docker knowledge but again isn't too difficult to set up. There are many useful guides online (though some may be outdated) and installing it through Docker makes it easier to combine it with other software like the *arr programs or qBitTorrent.
I run a Jellyfin server on a Pi 4. Been working great for 3ish years now. I even access it over VPN when I travel. But I only use Jellyfin for music.
However, if all you want is to access TV shows and movies over your network, consider hooking the Pi straight up to a TV with Kodi. I have a Pi 5 hooked up to my TV running Kodi, accessing movies and TV shows over samba, and it works great. Hardest part is figuring out the samba address in Kodi (figure it out on another device first).
I haven't set it up on Linux so I can't help you there I'm afraid but I've got a Jellyfin server set up on a Windows machine and it's been great. Currently got a 4TB drive used for movies and a 6TB for TV shows and been using it for around 9 months so far.
There's plenty of community modules to reskin Jellyfin so it looks like Plex or Netflix etc. along with community modules to add additional functionality.
We've currently got it set up with two profiles, one for me and my wife and a second for our daughter which is limited to films rated PG (Parental Guidance in the UK).
I've had to update it a couple times and it's been fairly pain free. There was the last time I updated it looked like it had lost all images for all films and TV shows, whether that be box images, logos, background images, etc. but a simple refresh of metadata on the library fixed it.
If it’s direct playing a file the subtitle timing is handled by the client? I use infuse as client and have no issues adjusting the occasional out of sync subtitle. Infuse will download subtitles if there aren’t any available “locally.”
And a note about renaming files/folders: why not set up the *arr suite so you can leave files where they are, named as they are, and just hard link to the jellyfin media directory? Edit: This would likely mean moving into docker world, but Trash Guides is a decent enough guide for most I’d think?
Delayed processing. This is going on Debian stable? Just use docker.
I’ll send you a compose file.
All you need to do is change the user/group, directory paths, save it, and
docker compose up -d. If you end up not liking jellyfin just delete the container.My question would be what's wrong with using Kodi?
I've been using Kodi (via OSMC recently on their excellent Vero hardware) for many many years and it's been totally fine for me. On Debian it's as simple as apt install kodi (once you have the deb-multimedia repo set up, but same for all multimedia stuff on debian)
I believe Plex shares some code with Kodi from long ago but I could be wrong about that.
Correct me if this has changed, but Kodi is an HTPC solution where you'd run Kodi on a computer and then plug that into a TV. Jellyfin/Plex/Emby are all server/client solutions where you have them running on one computer and then any other devices on the network can access media.
I haven't used Kodi in a very long time and even when I did it was briefly, but I believe Kodi is more like a client that also does some of the server functions that Plex and the like do in terms of content management and organizing etc.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Video_library
I looked in the wiki just to refresh my memory a little, you can see it does a lot of similar setup as you would do on the Plex server for library management.
Also in their FAQ
I think that helps clarify that you could technically use it as a server, but it's not designed for it and they're really more like clients on each platform. And it is multi-platform, it doesn't just run on PC operating systems, it works on other operating systems as well, looking at their downloads page. That you can point Kodi to network storage allows you to use it as a client on other systems that themselves don't store the content you are trying to watch.
https://kodi.tv/download/
It does not appear to be as widely supported across as many platforms as Plex or Emby, so in that regard I'd say it's not exactly a good replacement for someone who is concerned about that, or for someone who is attempting to share content remotely with others easily.