I Cancelled Netflix and Built My Own. Here Is Exactly How.

Netflix raised their prices again and I did the math and realized I was paying close to two thousand rupees a month for Netflix and Prime Video and Hotstar, most of which I watched maybe ten percent of on a good month. I cancelled all of them and built my own media server for a one-time cost of five thousand rupees for a hard drive and zero rupees a month after that. The software that makes this possible is Jellyfin, which is the most popular self-hosted media server with forty-seven thousand GitHub stars, and unlike Plex it does not phone home or require an account or have features locked behind their cloud.

Before you set up Jellyfin you need to get your media organized because Jellyfin is smart but it is not a mind reader. It uses file and folder names to fetch metadata like posters and descriptions and cast information, so if you name a file movie dot mkv you will get a blank poster and you will be sad. The convention is to put each movie in its own folder with the name and year, and each TV show in a folder with subfolders for seasons, and individual files named with the show and episode number. I use FileBot for renaming and it saves hours of manual work.

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
    ports:
      - "8096:8096"
    volumes:
      - config:/config
      - cache:/cache
      - /path/to/media:/media
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
    restart: unless-stopped

The devices line mounts your Intel or AMD GPU into the container for hardware transcoding, which is the feature that makes Jellyfin actually usable. Without hardware transcoding your CPU will cry when someone tries to watch a four-kilobyte video on their phone because the server has to convert the video format on the fly using software. With hardware transcoding a dedicated chip on your CPU does the work much faster and more efficiently, and the first time you see a video playing on your phone with single-digit CPU usage you will understand why this matters.

The first run walks you through setup, you pick your language and your media folders and your metadata language, and then Jellyfin starts scanning your collection. The first scan takes a while depending on how much media you have but after that it only scans new additions. The first time I saw my movie collection with proper posters and descriptions in a beautiful interface I felt a satisfaction that is hard to explain. It is like having your own personal Netflix without the guilt of paying a corporation that keeps cancelling shows you like.

To access Jellyfin from outside your home you point a subdomain at it through your reverse proxy, and now you can watch your media from anywhere on your phone or at a friend’s house or in a hotel room. I watch Jellyfin more than I ever watched Netflix because everything on it is stuff I actually want to watch, no endless scrolling, no are you still watching prompts, no recommendations trying to sell me something.

Jellyfin is the highest-return self-hosted service I run because it saves me money every month and gives me a library I actually control. If you have a collection of movies or shows put them in Jellyfin and you will wonder why you waited.

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