Build your own streaming server
YOU’LL NEED THIS
JELLYFIN
(https://jellyfin.org)comes as a server component for PC and Mac, plus client devices across all major mobile, desktop, and streaming box/TV platforms
IF YOU PREFER OWNED MEDIA to paying expensive monthly subscription services for the likes of Netflix or Amazon, then why not have the best of both worlds? Self-hosted services like Plex and Jellyfin make it possible to present your media in a way that’s easy and quick to access—no navigating multiple platforms or disc menus. Plex may be the king, but many of its best features are hidden away behind the Plex Pass paywall.
Thankfully, you can enjoy virtually all of Plex’s best features without paying a dime, thanks to the brilliant open-source Jellyfin. Since forking from another media server (Emby), Jellyfin has gone from strength to strength, and is now our go-to self-hosted media streamer. Here, we’ll show you how to get it installed, add your libraries, and get to grips with its navigation and playback controls. We’ll also introduce you to its powerful dashboard so you can explore what it offers even further.
–NICK PEERS
A
1
P
REPARE YOUR MEDIA
Before diving into installing Jellyfin, make sure your owned media is suitably named and organized so it can be easily imported into one of Jellyfin’s libraries. You’ll want to split different types of media into different categories, from simple libraries spanning all your movies, music, and TV, to potentially splitting out larger collections across multiple libraries (TV— Drama, TV—Comedy, and so on).
» There’s an art to naming your files, so Jellyfin can identify them and do the hard work of scraping various online metadata databases to provide you with titles, synopses, artwork, and more. Jellyfin follows Plex and other media servers, so it’s reasonably intuitive—visit the Media section at https://jellyfin.org/docs for details. However, the following conventions should cover most bases:
» MOVIES—name your movie Film Title (1990).mp4, and place it inside a folder of the same name, So Film Title (1990)\Film Title (1990).mp4. Extras should be organized into their own subfolders like featurettes, deleted scenes, trailers, and so on inside the main Film Title (1990) folder.