Ditching Plex Pass: Jellyfin 12 with Hardware Transcoding in Docker

Plex keeps moving features behind Plex Pass, and this month it finally got personal: hardware transcoding — the thing that lets a $150 mini-PC serve 4K to five devices at once — is paywalled. Meanwhile Jellyfin 12 shipped on September 7th (.NET 10, FFmpeg 8.1, a rewritten database, 12.1 bugfix follow-up on the 14th), and hardware transcoding in Jellyfin is free. It always was.

This is the full migration: the cost math, a working Docker Compose file with hardware transcoding for both Intel and NVIDIA, and the 10.x → 12 upgrade checklist — because 12 is a major migration and doing it wrong eats your library.

The math

Plex Pass lifetime is $120 on a good day and they’ve raised it before. Jellyfin is $0 forever, GPL-licensed, no phone-home, no account required. The one honest trade-off: Plex has better native apps on some smart TV platforms. If your household lives on a weird TV OS, check the Jellyfin client for it before you commit — for Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, iOS, and Android, you’re covered.

The Compose file

One file, everything included. This uses the official image; the LinuxServer image works too if you prefer PUID/PGID env vars.

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin:12.1
    container_name: jellyfin
    user: "1000:1000"          # match your media owner's UID:GID
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8096:8096"            # web UI
      # - "8920:8920"          # HTTPS (if not behind a reverse proxy)
      - "7359:7359/udp"        # client auto-discovery
      - "1900:1900/udp"        # DLNA
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config       # server config + database — BACK THIS UP
      - ./cache:/cache         # transcoding cache (disposable)
      - /mnt/media/movies:/media/movies:ro
      - /mnt/media/tv:/media/tv:ro
      - /mnt/media/music:/media/music:ro
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri      # Intel QuickSync / VA-API
    group_add:
      - "109"                  # render group — verify with: getent group render
    environment:
      - JELLYFIN_PublishedServerUrl=http://192.168.1.10:8096

mkdir -p jellyfin/config jellyfin/cache && cd jellyfin
docker compose up -d
# → http://<host>:8096, run the setup wizard, add /media/movies etc. as libraries

NVIDIA instead of Intel

Swap the devices/group_add block for the NVIDIA container toolkit (install nvidia-container-toolkit on the host first):

    # devices:            # remove the Intel block
    #   - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: 1
              capabilities: [gpu]

Then in both cases: Dashboard → Playback → Transcoding → Hardware acceleration → pick Intel QuickSync (QSV) or Nvidia NVENC, tick Enable hardware encoding, save. Play something, drop the quality to force a transcode, and verify the GPU is doing the work:

# Intel: should show Video/0 busy
intel_gpu_top
# NVIDIA:
nvidia-smi dmon -s u
# If neither moves and your CPU is pegged, transcoding fell back to software —
# recheck the device mapping and the render group.

The render-group permission issue is the #1 reason hardware transcoding silently doesn’t work in Docker. If /dev/dri exists on the host but the container can’t use it, confirm the GID: getent group render — it’s not always 109.

Migrating from Plex

The honest part: watch state doesn’t transfer. Played/unplayed status, watch history, and playlists stay in Plex. Everything else — the media files themselves — just works, because Jellyfin reads the same folders.

# Point Jellyfin at the exact same directories Plex used. Standard naming
# (which Plex also wanted) makes the scan clean:
/mnt/media/movies/Dune Part Two (2024)/Dune Part Two (2024).mkv
/mnt/media/tv/Severance/Season 02/Severance S02E01.mkv

After the first scan, install the plugins that close the remaining Plex Pass gaps: Intro Skipper (skip intros), Playback Reporting (watch stats), TMDb (better metadata). Dashboard → Plugins → Catalog.

Already on Jellyfin 10.x? Read this before touching 12.

Jellyfin 12 is not a routine update. The database schema changes and the migration rewrites data on first boot — there is no downgrade without a full backup. The project put the warning in bold and so will I. Checklist, in order:

1. Stop Jellyfin and take a full manual backup of your config and data directories. This is the only way back.
2. You must be on 10.10.7 or any 10.11.x before upgrading to 12.0. Older than that? Upgrade to 10.10.7 first, then 12.
3. Check your usernames. Usernames are now case-insensitive — if you have jellyfin and Jellyfin as two accounts, the migration fails. Rename one first.
4. Uninstall all third-party plugins before upgrading. Anything compiled for 10.11 will not load on the .NET 10 backend. Re-add them after, from the stable repo.
5. Reset the plugin repository URL to https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/plugin/manifest.json (Dashboard → Plugins → Repositories) if you ever switched it.
6. Upgrade, start, and do not interrupt it. The first boot runs the migrations; the first library scan after that takes significantly longer than normal and some items will appear as newly added. This is expected — 12 clears auto-grouped alternate versions and rebuilds them from disk.
7. Hard-refresh your browser (Ctrl+Shift+R) after upgrading — stale cached web assets are the #1 cause of weird UI glitches post-upgrade.

Also note: legacy /emby/* and /mediabrowser/* routes are gone, and old third-party clients that relied on them will break. If you have scripts hitting the API, the server now reports version 12.0.0 and the OpenAPI output changed — regenerate clients.

Remote access (2 minutes)

Don’t expose 8096 to the internet directly. Behind your existing reverse proxy:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name jellyfin.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8096;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        # websocket support (used by the web client)
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

Or Tailscale if you’d rather not open ports at all — Jellyfin works fine over a tailnet, and it’s the lowest-effort secure remote access for a homelab.

The verdict

Jellyfin 12’s upgrade is genuinely disruptive — that’s the price of the database rewrite that makes everything faster. But it’s a one-time migration for a permanent $0 bill. Cancel the Pass, keep the mini-PC, and put the $120 toward more storage. You’ll need it.