From Plex to Jellyfin

Plex has been enshittifying for a while by pushing its crappy on demand stuff. The final straw was Plex blocking access to your home server from remote locations without a pro account, so I decided it was finally time to move on. I’d been hearing good things about Jellyfin - an open source project with an active community.

Here are the steps I went through, not in any granular detail, but you should be able to figure things out via the various projects’ documentation. For context, our media server is an old spare mac sitting in the corner of the living room.

1. Installed jellyfin via homebrew - brew install jellyfin.
2. Ran jellyfin, set it up and pointed it to the existing media library directories.
3. Synced my watched data from plex using JellyPlex Watched I ran this using uv but there is a docker version if you prefer. I had to wrangle user and library name mapping a bit, I set the DEBUG_LEVEL to DEBUG so I could see what’s going on. The .env file is very well commented so it’s all pretty straightforward.
4. Set up a dns entry, plus a reverse proxy with caddy so I can access it all remotely via https. There’s a dashboard setting in Jellyfin specifically for proxy urls, so I filled that in.
5. Grabbed the phone and tablet apps and tested casting it to the TV. All good.
6. Deleted my plex server and plex account. Done!