Jellyfin – The new Nemesis of Plex Server

Plex server has been a staple of my home cloud since my media server was comprised of a laptop with the screen snapped off (literal headless server). However with the increasing ambiguity of their terms of service and privacy agreements I had been feeling more and more uneasy running this software inside my LAN. These feelings were only compounded by the slow and steady shift away from their community driven open-source roots.

Enter a server refresh; salvaged from the i7-4790k based system I just upgraded. This would provide significantly more transcoding horsepower over the outdated AMD APU I had been surviving on. In addition it provides a good opportunity to migrate onto the latest LTS version of my Linux distro. During this ordeal I had couldn’t bring myself to run my deployment scripts for Plex. Surely there has to be free, open, community focused alternative. I looked around there is a bit of a buzz picking up around this ‘Jellyfin’ eco-system.

I’ll admit Jellyfin hadn’t really been on my radar before this. While the program is just maturing out of it’s infancy now, it’s definitely reached the stage where it’s a usable Plex substitute. Besides the rough corners and lack of niche features, surprisingly the biggest downfall for me is the lack of a native Smart-TV app. Fortunately I have a chromecast so this wasn’t a deal-breaker. I am very excited to see how this platform develops, and provided it doesn’t follow in Plex’s footprints it has obtained its residency on my media server.