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As a long-time Plex Pass user I had become increasingly frustrated with three core issues:

The abysmal Amazon FireStick App – namely the need to constantly switch off the ‘new’ player due to its inability to play certain content.
The Docker containers insatiable appetite for memory, and its recent second course of /tmp storage to boot.
Content, that I don’t want and isn’t young kid friendly, especially when I’m paying for the platform.

Couple the above with a couple of ‘epic’ failures in consuming synchronized content offline (imagine a 3 year old, getting onto an 11 hour flight unable to access *anything*)… it’s safe to say I was ready to move on to pastures new.

I’d come across Jellyfin 12+ months back, but has dismissed it because there was no FireStick App, and with a young family ease of use is a must. Well… all that changed at some point in the last year as there is now an ‘approved’ FireStick app. After a couple of months of use, I’m pleased to have made the move, experiencing only a couple of minor niggles.

I opted to deploy Jellyfin using Docker, so the steps below assume you are already running Docker CE on your host/ media server. I also chose to enable Hardware Accelerated Encoding, using VAAPI.

First, create required directories, note, you may want to adjust for your environment.

mkdir -p ~/jellyfin/config
mkdir -p ~/jellyfin/cache
mkdir -p ~/jellyfin/transcode

sudo chown -R 1000:44 ~/jellyfin/

Now create the docker-compose.yml:

vi ~/jellyfin/docker-compose.yml

Paste contents as below, ensure you update volumes to reflect locations of your media:

version: '3.2'
services:

  prometheus:
    user: 1000:44
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    container_name: jellyfin
    network_mode: "host"
    logging:
      options:
        max-size: "10m"
        max-file: "5"
    restart: unless-stopped

    volumes:
    - /mnt/media:/media:shared:ro

    devices:
      # VAAPI Devices
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
      - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0

Note that user 1000:44 enables access to the VAAPI devices required for Hardware Accelerated Encoding.

You can now bring-up your Jellyfin environment:

sudo docker-compose up -d

Finally, browse to http://<server-name/IP>:8096 to access your Jellyfin instance.

You can enable Hardware Acceleration by browsing to Dashboard | Playback (tested on Intel QuickSync-enabled CPU):