Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server that enables users to manage and stream their personal media libraries (movies, TV shows, music, photos, and books) to any device, without any premium features, paywalls, or tracking. Created in 2018 as a community-driven fork of Emby (which had transitioned from fully open-source to a proprietary model), Jellyfin is committed to remaining completely free and open-source forever, with no paid tiers or feature gating. With over 38,000 stars as of 2026, Jellyfin has become the leading open-source alternative to Plex Media Server. Key features include: media library management (automatic scanning, organization, and metadata fetching for movies, TV shows, music, audiobooks, and photos via The Movie Database, TheTVDB, MusicBrainz, and other open metadata providers), multi-device streaming (web client, iOS, Android, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, and desktop clients), transcoding and direct play (hardware-accelerated transcoding via Intel QuickSync, NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, and VideoToolbox for macOS), live TV and DVR (supporting TV tuners like HDHomeRun, IPTV via M3U playlists, and XMLTV guides), subtitle management (downloading subtitles from OpenSubtitles, with on-the-fly subtitle conversion), music streaming (with lyrics, artist bios, and smart playlists), photo library (with timeline view and EXIF metadata), book library (for ebooks in EPUB and PDF formats), user management (multi-user support with parental controls and library-specific access), SSO authentication, session management (viewing and controlling active playback sessions), streaming quality settings, offline downloads on mobile, plugin system (extending functionality with community-developed plugins for themes, metadata providers, and scraping), and Docker deployment support.