Getting started with Jellyfin

Jellyfin turns a folder of films and television programmes into something that looks like a streaming service: posters, descriptions, cast lists, where you got to in episode four. It runs on a computer you control, it costs nothing, and nobody can remove a film from it.

This page is the part before the instructions. It is worth ten minutes because two of the decisions below are annoying to change later.

What Jellyfin actually is

Two pieces that people often confuse.

The server is a program that sits on a computer, watches some folders, works out what is in them, and hands the files out over your network. It has a web interface for administration, and that interface happens to be able to play video too, which is why it is easy to mistake for the whole product.

An app is a client. It asks the server what exists, shows you the artwork, and plays what you pick. Your phone, your television, your laptop browser and your tablet can each run a different client against the same server, and they all share the same watch history.

You need the server. You will then want a better client than the browser, which is where apps like JellyMold come in.

What you need

A computer that can stay switched on. It does not need to be powerful. A five-year-old laptop, a small desktop, a NAS or a rented virtual machine all work. What matters more than speed is that it does not go to sleep, because a sleeping server is an app that says it cannot connect.

Somewhere to keep the files. An internal drive, an external USB drive, or network storage. Video is large: budget roughly 2 to 8 GB per film at 1080p, and considerably more for 4K.

Your own media. Jellyfin organises and plays what you already have. It does not find content for you, and it comes with nothing.

A network. For watching at home, that is all. Watching from elsewhere is a separate job and a separate guide, and it is worth leaving until the server works on your own sofa first.

Decide where the server lives

This is the decision that is irritating to reverse, because it means moving both the software and the files.

The computer you already own is the right answer for most people starting out. It is free, you can get it working this afternoon, and you will learn what you actually need before spending anything. The catch is that it has to be awake when somebody wants to watch.

A NAS is the usual second step. It is already on all the time, it is quiet, and the drives are the point rather than an afterthought. Synology and QNAP both run Jellyfin, generally through Docker, and a NAS with a modern Intel chip can transcode video far better than its price suggests.

A rented server, a VPS, suits somebody whose upload speed at home is poor, or who wants the server to be reachable without touching their home network. It costs money every month and storage is the expensive part, so it works best for a modest library rather than everything you own.

Decide how your files are named

This is the other one worth getting right first, and it is the single most common reason a new library looks broken.

Jellyfin identifies a film by reading its filename, then looks that title up to fetch the poster, the description and the cast. Given a sensible name it is almost always correct. Given movie_final_2.mkv it has nothing to work with.

Films want a folder each, with the year in brackets:

Movies/
  Arrival (2016)/
    Arrival (2016).mkv
  The Third Man (1949)/
    The Third Man (1949).mkv

Television wants a folder per programme, then one per season, with season and episode numbers in every filename:

Shows/
  Detectorists/
    Season 01/
      Detectorists S01E01.mkv
      Detectorists S01E02.mkv

The year matters more than it looks. There are several films called Heat, and the year is what separates them.

Renaming a thousand files by hand is nobody’s idea of an evening. Tools like FileBot and tinyMediaManager exist for exactly this, and doing it before the first scan is much less work than fixing it afterwards.

What happens once it is running

The first scan takes a while. Jellyfin walks every folder, matches each title against an online database, and downloads artwork. A large library can take hours. This is normal and it happens once.

Then you set up a user for each person in the house. Separate accounts mean separate watch histories, which is the difference between a resume list that is useful and one that is everybody’s half-finished episodes at once.

Then you install an app worth using. The web interface is fine for administration and not much fun to watch on.