Jellyfin

Overview

Jellyfin turns the media already on this box into a real streaming service: cover art, seasons and episodes, resume-where-you-left-off, and per-person profiles, played from a browser or the Jellyfin app on a phone, tablet, Android TV, Roku, or Kodi. It is genuinely free: no account, no subscription, no telemetry, and nothing about your library leaves the box.

Features

• Cover art, season/episode organization, and resume-where-you-left-off across every device
• Per-person profiles for the household
• Automatic artwork and descriptions fetched for what it finds in your library
• On-the-fly transcoding when a client can't play a file directly
• Apps for browser, phone, tablet, Android TV, Roku, and Kodi

Setting up

Your files stay exactly where they are: Jellyfin reads your Movies and Music folders in place and never moves or rewrites them; uninstalling Jellyfin leaves every file untouched. The first time you open the app, complete the short setup wizard, which creates your admin account there; there is no default password. When it asks you to add a library, point it at:

• Movies: /malmo/movies
• Music: /malmo/music

Those are the paths your granted folders appear at inside the app.

Good to know

Jellyfin transcodes using the CPU only, which is fine for direct play and for one stream that needs converting, but re-encoding a high-bitrate 4K file for a weak client can make a modest box work hard; keeping files in a format your clients play natively avoids this. LAN auto-discovery is also off, so the Jellyfin apps on your TV and phone won't find this server by themselves; enter the server address by hand once and they'll remember it.