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.
The Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVMe HAT finally solves the Pi storage bottleneck. But does it make the Pi 5 a viable Jellyfin server in 2026? We benchmarked library scan speed, metadata loading, Direct Play performance, and compared it head-to-head against the Intel N100 mini PC. Includes NVMe HAT installation, Docker setup, and honest recommendations for when the Pi 5 is enough and when you should spend $50 more on an N100.
Four self-hosted photo platforms, four completely different philosophies. This in-depth comparison covers AI face detection, mobile auto-upload, RAW support, video handling, storage architecture, and which combination gives you the best Google Photos replacement in 2026.
Tracearr is a self-hosted playback tracking application that records viewing history from Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex simultaneously into a single unified database. Unlike server-specific plugins (Jellyfin Playback Reporting, Tautulli), Tracearr provides cross-platform analytics, long-term history retention, and integrates with tools like Emby Wrapped and Reclaimerr for year-in-review stats and storage cleanup decisions.
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.
Three operating systems dominate the homelab space for running Jellyfin: Unraid (flexible, user-friendly), TrueNAS SCALE (ZFS, free, Docker-native since Electric Eel), and Proxmox (hypervisor with LXC and VMs). This comparison covers Docker support, GPU passthrough complexity, storage architecture, backup capabilities, community size, and total cost of ownership for each platform.
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.
Is self-hosting actually cheaper than paying for streaming services? This detailed financial analysis compares the 5-year total cost of a self-hosted media stack (Jellyfin + hardware + storage + electricity) against the combined cost of Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, YouTube Premium, and Google Photos. Includes hardware amortization, electricity costs, and the break-even point for different library sizes.
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.
