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. ...