Jellyfin Media Server

I own over 1,000 hard copies of martial arts movies, but the downside is that I’ve always had to manually insert each disc into my Blu-ray player to watch them. On top of that, I couldn’t stream them to my other smart devices... only my TV.

That changed when I discovered 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.  You will need to store all media files on an external hard drive. Once this is set up, you can stream all your media files on all of your smart devices.

Jellyfin isn’t just for movies, it also supports photos and books. It’s a great way to back up your personal photos too, especially since cloud services like Google Photos aren’t as reliable as they used to be. For example, Google can close your account after just two years of inactivity, which means your treasured memories could be lost forever! I recommend everyone check it out.

Below are some of the guides I used to set everything up:

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-jellyfin/

Jellyfin only works locally; however, you can set up a VPN to access Jellyfin using Tailscale so that you can access your media collection locally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtYhL9hCdMw&ab_channel=TechWithDavid

Accessing your Raspberry Pi using a VNC server:

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-vnc-server/

I connected my setup to a smart plug, so if it stops responding, I can simply reboot it through the smart plug.