Jellyfin on Raspberry Pi

🔍 Key Features

• FREE: Unlike Plex, there are no costs associated with Jellyfin, even if watching remotely.
• Open source: Licensed under GPLv2, developed by a volunteer community.
• Cross‑platform: Works across desktop, mobile, and smart devices.
• Customization: Flexible plugins and metadata providers let you tailor how your library looks and behaves.
• Scalability: Can be deployed on a Raspberry Pi for home use or scaled up on enterprise servers.
• Community‑driven: Updates, bug fixes, and new features are contributed by a global developer base.

Plex vs Jellyfin

Plex is wonderful. You can have one media directory and dump all your content there (e.x. Movies, TV Shows) and Plex will scan that directory and sort out of it's a Movie or TV Show. Jellyfin, on the otherhand, requires that you have a seperate directory for movies and one for TV shows. Each TV show has to have subdirectories, one per season. It's not nearly as slick as Plex. Since I run Plex (for inside my network use) and Jellyfin (for remote use) and I use the same media directories for both, I had to redo my Plex config to use a Movies directory and a TV Shows directory. That setup is in this guide. Could I use Plex for local and remote viewing? Sure. I'm working on it. I've got tailscale setup on my mac, iPhone, and Pi. I can connect to Plex on my laptop using Tailscale and my iPhone as a hotspot and everything works great but when I try to use the Plex app in my iPhone (with WiFi off), I hit the paywall. I'm not sure why yet. Jellyfin has no paywall which is why I added Jellyfin to my enviroment.

🚀 Docker Installation Steps

1. Update your system
   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
2. Install Docker
   

   curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
   sudo sh get-docker.sh 

3. Install Docker Compose
   sudo apt install docker-compose-plugin
4. Add your user to the Docker group
   sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
5. Enable Docker at boot
   sudo systemctl enable docker
6. Reboot
   sudo reboot
7. Test Docker
   docker run hello-world

📁 Setup Jellyfin

mkdir ~/docker
mkdir ~/docker/jellyfin 

🧾 Docker Compose File

In ~/docker/jellyfin create docker-compose.yml

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - TZ=America/New_York   # Eastern Time
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache
      - /mnt/Movies:/Movies      # This is where the media files for your Movies are stored
      - /mnt/TV Shows:/TV Shows  # This is where the media files for your TV Shows are stored
    restart: unless-stopped

NOTE: Follow this guide to setup your media folder: Jellyfin Media Structure

In a nutshell, if /mnt/Media is where you're storing everything, you should have something like /mnt/Media/Movies, /mnt/Media/TV_Shows, etc. Under each of those you'll have a directory for each movie, TV show, etc. For example: /mnt/Movies/John_Wick_(2014) and in there would be the movie file (.mkv, .avi, etc.). You shouldn't have any other junk in there or it could screw up Jellyfin.

▶️ Start Jellyfin

From within ~/docker/jellyfin run:

📜 View Logs

🌐 Access Web Interface

Open your browser and go to http://<your-pi>:8096