Jellyfin: Avoiding subscriptions like the plague

A few weeks ago, I got tired of constantly asking my girlfriend to bring her iPad over to my house just to watch shows and movies. I have a TV at home, and constantly using the iPad never felt right.

I've never had a Netflix subscription, because I never knew if I could make it worth it. Would I really watch at least $20 of shows every month?

Then I stumbled onto some YouTube Shorts about setting up an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin and friends), and it piqued my interest. It didn't look difficult or complicated, and it sounded like a fun weekend project.

This post is how I set it up, in the order that worked for me, with bits you can click on as you read.

What I'm actually building

If you haven't met the term: an arr stack is a set of self-hosted apps, most of them named Something-arr, that find, download and organise movies and TV shows for a media server. Radarr handles movies, Sonarr handles TV, Prowlarr manages the indexers, and Jellyfin plays the result.

The setup itself looked pretty straightforward. One Raspberry Pi runs all of the software, and the movies and series sit on an external hard drive. I'd say it's straightforward even with nine pieces that fit together, because each one has a pretty simple purpose:

Here's how they all connect together. Tap an app to see who it talks to, or press Play to follow one movie from request to TV.

Why isn't this just one plug-and-play app?

Nine containers is a lot of moving parts for "watch a movie". It makes sense when you think about it: each app does exactly one job, and they talk to each other through plain web addresses and API keys.

The upside is the flexibility to swap, update or switch off any single piece without touching the rest. For a stack like this, being able to swap out an unmaintained app for an alternative matters, since they are all community-maintained. If you really wanted to, you could even write your own app and hook it into the stack. I'd say this is an essential part of what makes the *arr stack work as a whole.

You will feel the downside while setting everything up, though: more things to set up and keep updated. Debugging can also be a hassle.

Picking the Pi, and everything else I needed

A bit of digging around landed me on the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. The price gap between the Pi 4 and the Pi 5 isn't big, so I went with the newer one, and the 8GB gives me some leeway for smaller side projects later.

• The gap: about $10 in the US when I checked on 29 Oct 2026.
• Prices keep moving. The Pi 5 8GB launched at $80 in 2023. Raspberry Pi has raised prices several times since because of memory costs, most recently on 1 April 2026.

With the Pi picked, this is what I actually bought.

It took about a week for everything to arrive, since some of the parts came from London.

Setting it up, step by step

This was the flow I followed when setting everything up. The core components are quite linear, and the optional apps come in any time.

ssh youruser@mediapi.local
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
sudo reboot

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
# log out, log back in, then:
docker compose version
docker run --rm hello-world

lsblk
sudo mkfs.ext4 -L media /dev/sda1
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/media
sudo blkid /dev/sda1
echo 'UUID=PASTE-UUID-HERE /mnt/media ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo mount -a
df -h /mnt/media

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/media/data/downloads /mnt/media/data/media/tv /mnt/media/data/media/movies
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /mnt/media/data
mkdir -p ~/stack/config

cd ~/stack
docker compose up -d
docker compose ps

docker logs qbittorrent 2>&1 | grep -i password

My compose file, with your pick of containers

This is my stack written as a docker-compose file. Switch containers on and off and the file changes with it. The checker complains if something depends on an app you left out.

cd ~/stack
mkdir -p config/{jellyfin,seerr,qbittorrent,radarr,sonarr,prowlarr,bazarr,maintainerr}

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/jellyfin:/config
      - /mnt/media/data/media:/data/media
    ports: ["8096:8096"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  seerr:
    image: ghcr.io/seerr-team/seerr:latest
    container_name: seerr
    init: true
    environment: [TZ=Asia/Singapore, PORT=5055, LOG_LEVEL=info]
    volumes:
      - ./config/seerr:/app/config
    ports: ["5055:5055"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  qbittorrent:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest
    container_name: qbittorrent
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore, WEBUI_PORT=8080]
    volumes:
      - ./config/qbittorrent:/config
      - /mnt/media/data:/data
    ports: ["8080:8080", "6881:6881", "6881:6881/udp"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/radarr:/config
      - /mnt/media/data:/data
    ports: ["7878:7878"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/sonarr:/config
      - /mnt/media/data:/data
    ports: ["8989:8989"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  prowlarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:latest
    container_name: prowlarr
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/prowlarr:/config
    ports: ["9696:9696"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  bazarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/bazarr:latest
    container_name: bazarr
    environment: [PUID=1000, PGID=1000, TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/bazarr:/config
      - /mnt/media/data/media:/data/media
    ports: ["6767:6767"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  flaresolverr:
    image: ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:latest
    container_name: flaresolverr
    environment: [TZ=Asia/Singapore, LOG_LEVEL=info]
    ports: ["8191:8191"]
    restart: unless-stopped

  maintainerr:
    image: ghcr.io/maintainerr/maintainerr:latest
    container_name: maintainerr
    user: "1000:1000"
    environment: [TZ=Asia/Singapore]
    volumes:
      - ./config/maintainerr:/opt/data
    ports: ["6246:6246"]
    restart: unless-stopped

Why every app mounts the same /data

Radarr and Sonarr don't copy a finished download into the library, they hardlink it: one file on disk, two names. That only works if both names live on the same mount. Try it with each setting and watch the disk.

Getting the apps to talk to each other

Every connection screen asks for a host. Pick what goes in the host box and press Test. The containers all share one Docker network, so the most reliable way is to use the container name. I reserved 192.168.0.22 as the Pi's IP address, so I can swap the container name for 192.168.0.22 without any real problems as well.

Things that usually go wrong

Nearly every problem I had comes down to a wrong address, a wrong path or a missing permission.

Day to day

Day to day it's just: open Seerr, request something, wait. When it shows up in Jellyfin it already has subtitles, unless Bazarr couldn't find any. The microSD card only holds the OS and app settings, and all the heavy writing goes to the 1TB drive. Back up ~/stack/config every now and then, and remember the drive isn't a backup.

cd ~/stack && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
docker compose ps
docker logs --tail 50 sonarr
df -h /mnt/media

Now, all of the TVs have the Jellyfin TV app installed, and can stream pretty smoothly most of the time. There are some slight issues like transcoding, since the Pi can't transcode on its own, but those are outside the scope of this blog.

Pretty good convenience overall, and I think it's pretty worth it 👍

I only use this for content I'm legally entitled to download. 👍