You don't need Jellyfin (probably)

Title is somehow a rage bait, but I want to expand it a bit. You do not need Jellyfin if you use it only in your LAN and only for videos. I had Jellyfin installed to do this, and I know many people have as well. This post is not financial advice, read with caution!

Explanation

My setup was like this:

• QNAP NAS hosting videos
• Dell Wyse mini-PC with Jellyfin container and NFS access

It worked, um, well, but it was pointless. Actually, main reasons to use Jellyfin are:

1. video transcoding
2. automatic metadata retrieval

Video transcoding

For the first one it took quite a long time to get it working inside a container. However, then I realized (after one year of using it) that the only devices I use Jellyfin on are: TV 1 (Nvidia Shield), TV 2 (Chromecast with Google TV) and sometimes my smartphone (Pixel 9). All these devices can play all my H.264, HEVC and VP9 encoded videos natively, without any transcoding. I paid for hardware capable of playing videos in modern codecs. Your hardware will probably handle them as well, unless you actually have media encoded in codecs that your end devices do not support, but then you probably know what you are doing.

Automatic metadata retrieval

To be honest, I don’t even like this feature. I like to tag and provide metadata for my media manually and inject it directly into a file, because mkv containers can store them. This makes your library portable and highly compatible with other software. Jellyfin, on the other hand saves metadata to separate files. That is the reason why I also use Navidrome to host my music collection - it doesn’t try to obtain metadata for me, but it uses existing values to work.

Solution

I still want to have access to my videos on all these devices, but I want to simplify my setup. What if not Jellyfin? There is actually a standard (set of standards to be precise) called DLNA¹. It was introduced in 2004, years before Jellyfin, Plex or even Netflix (as a streaming service).

I even used to use it without realizing it 13 years ago to share my media from Windows to Xbox 360 using Windows Media Player. DLNA is supported by a wide range of devices, not only modern ones. Your TV, even if not smart, can probably play from DLNA shares somehow. I feel obligated to note that it’s not an open standard. Device needs to be “certified” to use DLNA. That’s also the case for standards like HDMI. Entertaiment industry sucks. However, that’s the theory. In practice many software and devices support DLNA without calling it by name and everyone’s happy.

You can access shared media with VLC or Nova Video Player on Android and Android TV devices. Both apps are open-source, and you can even use external player (e.g. mpv) in the second one. Funny feature to see in the app with the “player” word in its name.

I’ve mentioned before that I have QNAP server. I don’t want to host any containers on my NAS, but there are options like minidlna. Keep in mind that this piece of software hasn’t received any uppdate for 15 years, but maybe it’s just perfect². My NAS has built-in support for DLNA with “Media Streaming add-on” installed. I just needed to select my video directory and that’s it.

DLNA supports not only videos, but music and images as well, so even more features of Jellyfin to steal if you are interested. However, as I mentioned before, I use Navidrome for music, because I benefit from additional layer of abstraction over plain music files more than I do for video.