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.
Real stories from the Jellyfin community: corrupted databases after power outages, lost watch history from failed 10.11 migrations, drives dying with no backup, and accidental rm -rf on config folders. Each story includes what went wrong, what could have prevented it, and the exact recovery steps. Plus a complete disaster recovery playbook you can implement today.
Build a kid-friendly streaming experience on Jellyfin that rivals Disney+ without ads, tracking, or inappropriate content. Covers dedicated kids libraries, parental rating enforcement, access schedules, age-appropriate themes, PIN-protected profiles, and how to make the interface simple enough for a 4-year-old to navigate with a TV remote.
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.
Every tool in the self-hosted media ecosystem explained, how they connect, and the exact data flow from a user requesting a movie to it playing on their TV. Covers Seerr, Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr, qBittorrent, Bazarr, Tdarr, Jellyfin, and monitoring. Includes the complete Docker Compose and visual architecture.
Fail2Ban is not enough in 2026. This advanced security guide covers CrowdSec (collaborative IPS with crowd-sourced blocklists), GeoIP country blocking, rate limiting at the reverse proxy level, container security best practices, and real-time intrusion detection for your internet-exposed Jellyfin server.
The Steam Deck is a portable Linux PC that runs Jellyfin natively - no homebrew required. This guide covers installing Jellyfin Media Player in Desktop Mode, adding it as a non-Steam game for Game Mode with controller support, codec compatibility, HDR on OLED models, and offline download strategies.
