Jellyfin


Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server and suite of multimedia applications designed to organize, manage, and share digital media files to networked devices. Jellyfin consists of a server application installed on a machine running Linux, Microsoft Windows, or macOS; and another application running on a client device such as a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, streaming media player, game console or in a web browser. Jellyfin also can serve media to DLNA and Chromecast-enabled devices. It is a fork of Emby.

Features

Jellyfin follows a client–server model that allows multiple users and clients to connect and stream digital media remotely. Because Jellyfin runs as a self-contained server, there is no subscription-based consumption model, and Jellyfin does not utilize an external connection nor third-party authentication for this functionality. This enables Jellyfin to work on an isolated intranet in much the same fashion as it does over the Internet. Because it shares a heritage with Emby, some clients for that platform are unofficially compatible with Jellyfin; however, as Jellyfin's codebase diverges from Emby, this becomes less possible. Jellyfin does not support a direct migration path from Emby.
Jellyfin is extensible, and optional third-party plugins exist to provide additional feature functionality. The project hosts an official repository, although plugins need not be hosted in the official repository to be installable.
Version 10.6.0 of the server software introduced a feature known as "SyncPlay", which provides functionality for multiple users to consume media content together in a synchronized fashion. Support to read epub-format ebooks with Jellyfin was also added, together with support for third-party plugin repositories, allowing users to create and install plugins without the need for the official repository. The web front-end has been split off in a separate system, in anticipation of the move towards a SQL back-end and high availability with multiple servers.
Jellyfin can be run in a Docker container.

Clients

There are a number of Jellyfin clients that can be used to connect to a Jellyfin server via HTTP port 8096 or HTTPS port 8920. Jellyfin also can also act as a DLNA server and send media to Chromecast-enabled devices.
Some notable clients include:
The project began on December 8, 2018, when co-founders Andrew Rabert and Joshua Boniface, among other users, agreed to fork Emby in reaction to closing of open-source development on that project. Jellyfin's name, a reference to streaming, was conceived of by Rabert the following day. An initial release was made available on December 30, 2018.

Version history

Jellyfin's unique version numbering began with version 10.0.0 in January 2019.
Major versionRelease dateNotes
October 20, 2025Due to being such a major release, the usual 6 month release schedule was not adhered to. New features include complete removal of ARM32 support, improved search performance and HEVC decoding support for Firefox
October 27, 2024Media segments, Dolby Vision HDR, deprecated x32 bit ARM, deprecated Raspberry Pi V4L2, deprecated network paths
May 11, 2024
June 11, 2022
March 8, 2021
July 19, 2020Introduction of SyncPlay feature and EPUB reading
March 8, 2020Hardware acceleration encoding and decoding support added for the Raspberry Pi
October 6, 2019
April 19, 2019
February 16, 2019
January 25, 2019
January 7, 2019
December 30, 2018Only release to use original Emby version numbering