🌑 The Jellyfin Path — Getting Started with Your Synology · ← Choose Your Path
Jellyfin, the free and fully self-hosted alternative to Plex. We run Plex day to day, so this one’s written straight — accurate, tested steps, without pretending it’s what’s actually serving our library.
jellyfin/jellyfin image.
Step 1 — Make the folders
Same pattern as the Plex guide: a docker/jellyfin folder in File Station, with config and cache subfolders inside it, kept separate from the media library itself.
Step 2 — The compose file
In Container Manager → Project → Create, point it at docker/jellyfin and use this, adjusting the media path to match your setup:
services:
jellyfin:
image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
container_name: jellyfin
environment:
TZ: America/Chicago
volumes:
- /volume1/docker/jellyfin/config:/config
- /volume1/docker/jellyfin/cache:/cache
- /volume1/media:/data
ports:
- "8096:8096"
restart: unless-stopped
network_mode: host for normal web-client use — straight port mapping works fine. Jellyfin’s own docs recommend host networking specifically for DLNA auto-discovery; skip it unless you actually need that.Step 3 — Finish setup in the browser
Deploy the project, then go to http://YOUR_NAS_IP:8096. Unlike Plex’s claim-token flow, Jellyfin’s first-run wizard runs entirely locally — no account creation on a third-party service required, which is the whole point of it for a lot of people. Set your admin account, point it at the /data path you mapped, name your libraries, let it scan.
Step 4 — Hardware transcoding, if you need it
Jellyfin’s hardware acceleration lives in Dashboard → Playback, and — the actual difference from Plex here — it’s available to everyone, no Plex Pass equivalent required. Whether it works depends entirely on your NAS having a supported hardware encoder and that encoder being exposed into the container correctly; check your specific Synology model’s capabilities before assuming it’s there.
That closes out the media-server half of this series. Plex and Jellyfin solve the same problem two different ways — one leans on a company’s infrastructure and polish, the other keeps everything local at the cost of doing more yourself. Worth knowing both, even if you only run one.
Already on Plex and switching over rather than starting fresh? There’s a dedicated guide for pulling your watch history across: migrating from Plex to Jellyfin.
One thing neither of them protects you from: losing the NAS itself. Next: Part 4: Backups and Snapshots →