Tips, updates, and guides from the JellyWatch team.
One Docker Compose file. Four specialized media servers. Every type of content covered: movies and TV (Jellyfin), photos (Immich), comics and ebooks (Kavita), and music (Navidrome). This guide provides the complete stack with shared storage, unified reverse proxy, and monitoring. The definitive all-media self-hosted setup for 2026.
Running one Jellyfin server works for most users. But what happens when you have 20+ concurrent users, need geographic distribution for remote viewers, or require zero-downtime maintenance? This advanced guide covers multi-server Jellyfin architectures: shared storage with multiple instances behind a load balancer, active-passive failover, geo-distributed servers with WatchState sync, and the honest limitations of scaling Jellyfin beyond a single node.
Serve your Jellyfin library to users worldwide with low latency using Cloudflare R2 for storage and Workers for edge logic. This advanced guide covers uploading media to R2, creating STRM files for Jellyfin, building a Worker that handles range requests and authentication, cost analysis vs traditional VPS hosting, and the honest limitations of this approach.
Run Jellyfin on Kubernetes using K3s for automatic restarts, rolling updates, and multi-node scaling. This guide covers K3s installation, Helm chart deployment, Intel GPU device plugin for hardware transcoding, persistent volume claims for config and media, Ingress with cert-manager for HTTPS, and horizontal pod autoscaling.
Not everyone has a home server. A VPS from Hetzner (€4.50/month) or Contabo gives you a dedicated Jellyfin instance with a public IP, 1 Gbps bandwidth, and 24/7 uptime. This guide covers VPS selection, Docker deployment, storage mounting, the no-GPU reality, and when Oracle free tier is enough.
Jellyfin dashboard taking forever to load? Library browsing feels sluggish? This guide covers the real causes - slow metadata storage, EF Core 10.11 regressions, large library enumeration, plugin overhead, and database bloat - with proven fixes.
Run Jellyfin on Proxmox with hardware transcoding in an LXC container or VM. This guide covers Intel QSV device mapping (3 lines of config), NVIDIA PCI passthrough, NAS storage mounting via NFS/SMB, performance tuning, and the community helper script that automates the entire setup.
How much CPU, RAM, and storage does a Jellyfin server actually need in 2026? This guide covers minimum and recommended specs for every use case - from a single-user home setup to a multi-user 4K server - with real-world transcoding benchmarks.
Tdarr automatically transcodes your entire Jellyfin library to save storage, ensure compatibility, and eliminate buffering. Learn how to set up Tdarr with Jellyfin for hands-free media optimization.
