Tips, updates, and guides from the JellyWatch team.
Four self-hosted photo platforms, four completely different philosophies. This in-depth comparison covers AI face detection, mobile auto-upload, RAW support, video handling, storage architecture, and which combination gives you the best Google Photos replacement in 2026.
Tracearr is a self-hosted playback tracking application that records viewing history from Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex simultaneously into a single unified database. Unlike server-specific plugins (Jellyfin Playback Reporting, Tautulli), Tracearr provides cross-platform analytics, long-term history retention, and integrates with tools like Emby Wrapped and Reclaimerr for year-in-review stats and storage cleanup decisions.
Running one Jellyfin server works for most users. But what happens when you have 20+ concurrent users, need geographic distribution for remote viewers, or require zero-downtime maintenance? This advanced guide covers multi-server Jellyfin architectures: shared storage with multiple instances behind a load balancer, active-passive failover, geo-distributed servers with WatchState sync, and the honest limitations of scaling Jellyfin beyond a single node.
Three operating systems dominate the homelab space for running Jellyfin: Unraid (flexible, user-friendly), TrueNAS SCALE (ZFS, free, Docker-native since Electric Eel), and Proxmox (hypervisor with LXC and VMs). This comparison covers Docker support, GPU passthrough complexity, storage architecture, backup capabilities, community size, and total cost of ownership for each platform.
Is self-hosting actually cheaper than paying for streaming services? This detailed financial analysis compares the 5-year total cost of a self-hosted media stack (Jellyfin + hardware + storage + electricity) against the combined cost of Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, YouTube Premium, and Google Photos. Includes hardware amortization, electricity costs, and the break-even point for different library sizes.
Run Jellyfin on Kubernetes using K3s for automatic restarts, rolling updates, and multi-node scaling. This guide covers K3s installation, Helm chart deployment, Intel GPU device plugin for hardware transcoding, persistent volume claims for config and media, Ingress with cert-manager for HTTPS, and horizontal pod autoscaling.
Every tool in the self-hosted media ecosystem explained, how they connect, and the exact data flow from a user requesting a movie to it playing on their TV. Covers Seerr, Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr, qBittorrent, Bazarr, Tdarr, Jellyfin, and monitoring. Includes the complete Docker Compose and visual architecture.
Reclaimerr is a self-hosted application that helps you reclaim disk space by identifying unwatched and low-rated media in your library. It integrates with Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby (simultaneously if needed), supports Radarr and Sonarr for managed deletions, offers a protection system so users can save content from cleanup, and includes multi-user permissions with notification support via Apprise.
ChartHound is a self-hosted Docker application that combines music metadata tagging with real Billboard chart data, playlist creation pushed directly to Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, missing chart hit discovery via Prowlarr, album hunting through MusicBrainz, and missing movie/TV tracking via Radarr and Sonarr. Ships with 108,000+ Billboard chart entries pre-loaded.
