How to install Jellyfin on a NAS

Jellyfin is one of the best Plex alternatives for a great NAS, and it’s one that I personally use. It’s a media server that can stream and transcode video for clients, and it’s completely free and open source. It requires a bit of setup to get working, but it’s well worth it once it’s configured and working perfectly.

This guide assumes that you’re using a NAS operating system like TrueNAS, but the steps are similar on other NAS types. Jellyfin works with a large library of ripped media, which I recently migrated my multi-year collection from a hard drive to my NAS, so any of the best NASs for Plex will also be great for Jellyfin.

Step 1: Configure your datasets

You’ll need to configure two datasets for your movies and TV shows, and this is fairly easy to do.

1. In TrueNAS, click Datasets on the left.
2. Click Add Dataset in the top right.
3. Name the first one “movies.”
4. Change Case sensitivity to Insensitive.

Do the same again to create another dataset, but name it “tv” instead of “movies.”

Step 2: Install Jellyfin

Next, we’ll be installing Jellyfin, but we’ll need to change a few of the installation parameters.

1. Go to Apps.
2. Click Available applications.
3. Search for “Jellyfin.”
4. Click Install.
5. Make a note of the “web port.” For me, the default was 30013.
6. Click Add beside Additional storage.
7. Copy the following:

   

8. Click Add again and repeat the same as the above, but changing to /tv and selecting the /tv dataset instead.

Now you can click Save at the bottom. It may take a minute to deploy.

Step 3: Configure Jellyfin

If everything went well, you can navigate to Jellyfin either by clicking Web portal beside the Jellyfin application, or navigating to the following in your browser:

http://:

For me, I navigate to:

http://192.168.1.5:30013

Once you’ve accessed Jellyfin, simply follow the steps on screen.

1. Set your language.
2. Choose a username and password. You can leave the password field blank so that all you need is a username.
3. Add your media library. Keep all settings at default, but choose the content type and the associated folder by clicking the Plus beside Folders. Click Next when you’ve added your folders.
4. Click through and make sure Allow remote connections to the server is ticked. You can choose to enable automatic port mapping if you want, but you can also just access your NAS remotely through the likes of WireGuard to access your server.
5. Click Finish

Enjoy your content!

Now that you’ve configured Jellyfin, you can copy any of your content into the associated /movies and /tv datasets so that Jellyfin can automatically discover them. It will fill out any and all details of the show or movie based on filenames, so you can rest assured that your content will be easy to find. It will also automatically pull in subtitles, transcode media for playback, and give you detailed information about the content that you’re watching.