Paying a monthly fee to stream movies and shows you already own that sit on drives in your house sounds silly when you think about it. Plex built its reputation on solving the home media problem, but it quietly put the best features behind a subscription. Jellyfin does everything Plex does, like remote streaming, mobile apps, offline downloads, metadata, and collections, and it doesn't charge you for any of it.
You don't need a powerful computer to run your server
Running everything in Docker keeps your setup clean and separate
Getting started with Jellyfin means first figuring out what hardware you'll run it on. You can run it on your own PC, but if you want it to be on its own server, you have many options. You can choose something small and cheap like a Raspberry Pi, an alternative to that, or go all the way up to an old laptop you have lying around or a proper NAS box.
If you're going the Raspberry Pi route, do yourself a favor and install a minimal OS like Raspberry Pi OS Lite or DietPi instead of the full desktop version. It keeps things lean and leaves more resources for actually serving the media.
You don't need a powerhouse. Even an old dual-core with a few gigs of RAM will handle Jellyfin just fine for a household or two. The cleanest way to get it running is with Docker. Putting Jellyfin in a container keeps it separate from everything else on the machine, makes updates as simple as pulling a new image, and saves you from the dependency nightmares that come with installing things directly on the OS.
Pretty much any current Linux distro will work as the host. Ubuntu Server or Debian are the go-to choices, but I run mine on…