Plex and Jellyfin home server guide

This is the page for people who like a project. A home media server is a computer, or a small box, that holds video and photos and plays them to every TV, phone and tablet in the house. Done right it replaces the drawer of hard drives, keeps the wedding video safe, and records the Late Late off the aerial so you can skip the ads.

What it’s for, and what it isn’t

Everything here is about content you’re entitled to. Four things, and only four:

Recordings off the aerial. This is the big one for Irish households. Saorview carries RTÉ One, RTÉ2, Virgin Media One to Four, TG4 and more, free, in the clear. A TV tuner turns the server into a recorder for all of it: series-link the news, record the GAA match you’ll miss on Sunday, have the kids’ programmes ready for when they’re wanted.

Home videos and photos. Every phone in the house dumps into one place, backed up, sorted by date, watchable on the big screen at Christmas. Plex and Jellyfin both handle photos as well as video.

DRM-free purchases. Films, series and music sold as plain downloadable files with no copy protection, such as music bought from the likes of Bandcamp and video from some independent and documentary outlets. Anything from a big streaming or download store is protected and won’t play here, and that’s by design.

Plex’s own free library. Plex bundles a large catalogue of ad-supported films and series plus free live channels. It’s the thing you watch when you can’t decide, and it costs nothing.

That’s the list. If a forum post promises more than that, close the tab. We don’t cover copying discs: whether you may copy one you own is a legal question in Ireland, and one for a solicitor.

Plex or Jellyfin?

Two programs do the same job.

Pick Plex if you want it to just work, you like a free ad-supported catalogue thrown in, and you don’t mind an account. Pick Jellyfin if you’d rather nothing phones home, you don’t want a subscription, and you’re happy to spend an evening reading documentation. Plenty of people run both for a month and keep one; they can point at the same folders.

What Plex Pass costs. In US dollars, $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a five-year plan at $249.99 and the lifetime pass up to $749.99 from 1 July 2026. Plex charges in local currency at checkout, so check the euro figure on plex.tv (official source, opens in a new tab). If you only want to watch away from home, the cheaper Remote Watch Pass covers that. For recording Saorview, you need the full Plex Pass.

Three shopping lists

Pick by budget and ambition. Every list plays back on the stick or TV you already have.

Starter: use what you’ve got

The box: an Nvidia Shield TV Pro, or a PC or laptop you already own. Storage: one external USB drive.

The Shield TV Pro is the tidiest single box on this page: it’s the player and the server. Plug a USB drive into it, install Plex Media Server from the Play Store, and you’re done. The hardware is from 2019, so it won’t convert 4K for six phones at once, but for a family and a tuner it’s plenty. Check it’s in stock before you plan around it. Nvidia’s Shield page (official source, opens in a new tab)

An old PC or laptop left switched on does the same job for nothing. Plex and Jellyfin both install on Windows, macOS and Linux in ten minutes.

The weak spot is the single drive: when it dies, so does the library. Read the backups section before you put the only copy of anything on it.

Proper: a two-bay NAS

The box: a two-bay NAS. Storage: two matching NAS drives.

The grown-up option. A small, quiet box with two drives that mirror each other, running for years with Plex or Jellyfin installed as an app. If one drive fails, you swap it and nothing’s lost. If you want it to convert video for phones and tablets on the fly, choose a model with an Intel chip and built-in graphics; the cheaper ARM-based models are fine as a store but struggle with that. Some 2025 Synology models shipped without hardware transcoding support, so check the specific model.

Drives are sold separately. Budget for two of the same size, and buy drives sold for NAS use, which are built to run all day.

Power: a mini PC

The box: a mini PC with a recent Intel processor. Storage: an external drive or two, or a NAS on the network.

For people who want lots of simultaneous streams, 4K, or both Plex and Jellyfin side by side. A mini PC with Intel’s built-in graphics handles hardware transcoding comfortably, and it’s a normal computer, so you can run anything on it. Pair it with external drives, or keep the drives in a NAS and let the mini PC do the heavy lifting. More flexible, more to look after.

Setting up Plex, step by step

An evening’s job, most of it waiting for files to copy.

1. Install the server. Download Plex Media Server for your computer or NAS from plex.tv, or install it from the Play Store on a Shield or the app centre on a NAS. Sign in with a Plex account.
2. Organise your folders first. One folder per type: Home Videos, Photos, Recordings, Music. Plex works best when films and shows are named clearly, one folder per title.
3. Add libraries. In the Plex web app, add a library for each folder and choose its type. Home videos go in as “Other Videos” or “Photos” so Plex doesn’t try to match them to Hollywood.
4. Turn on hardware transcoding if your box supports it and you have a Plex Pass: Settings, then Server, then Transcoder, then “Use hardware acceleration when available”.
5. Remote access, only if you want it. Settings, then Remote Access. Watching away from home needs a Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass. If you don’t need it, leave it off.
6. Install the apps. The Plex app is on every stick and box on our streaming sticks page, most smart TVs and every phone. Sign in with the same account and your server appears.

Jellyfin is the same shape: install the server, create an admin user in the browser, add libraries, then install the Jellyfin app on each TV. Remote access is where it gets technical; start with it off.

Recording Saorview

Saorview uses DVB-T with MPEG-4 video, and Plex supports DVB-T and DVB-T2 tuners in Europe. Any decent tuner picks it up, fed by the same aerial your TV uses. A splitter behind the telly gives one feed to the set and one to the tuner. No aerial yet? That comes first: see aerials.

A USB tuner plugs straight into the server. The Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD is the safe pick: two tuners in one stick, so you can record one channel while watching another. Hauppauge lists it for DVB-T, DVB-T2 and DVB-C, which covers Saorview’s DVB-T, and it’s supported by Plex on Windows, Linux and the Nvidia Shield.

A network tuner sits beside the router, takes the aerial cable, and makes the channels available to anything on your network. The HDHomeRun FLEX QUATRO has four DVB-T/T2 tuners. It’s the easy option for a NAS without spare USB, and Jellyfin detects HDHomeRun tuners automatically.

In Plex: Settings, then Live TV and DVR, then set up a device. Plex finds the tuner, scans the channels and fills in the programme guide. Recording needs an active Plex Pass. Then find a programme in the guide and hit record, or record the whole series.

In Jellyfin: add the tuner under Live TV, then add a guide source. Jellyfin uses XMLTV guide files; free Irish ones exist, but expect an evening getting it right.

It records the broadcast as it comes off the air, so the quality is exactly what Saorview sends. Irish copyright law allows recording a broadcast for private and domestic use so it can be watched at another time (section 101 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000). So record it, watch it, and keep it in your own household: don’t share it out.

How much storage?

Work it out from what you’ll keep, not what you’ll record.

Recordings. For any video, one megabit per second for an hour is about 0.45GB. So a channel broadcasting at 8 megabits a second fills about 3.6GB an hour. Record a few hours a week and delete once watched, and a few hundred gigabytes is plenty.

Photos and home videos. Check how much your phones and old drives hold now, double it for the next few years, and that’s your number. Phone video is the big one.

The rule of thumb: buy about twice what you think you need today. In a mirrored NAS, remember two 4TB drives give you 4TB, not 8.

Backups: the 3-2-1 rule

A server makes it easy to put everything in one place. That’s the risk as well as the point.

The standard advice is 3-2-1: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy off-site. In practice for a household:

1. The server. Your working copy, mirrored if it’s a NAS.
2. A second drive. An external drive you copy to regularly, then unplug and put in a drawer. Most NAS software can do this on a schedule.
3. Somewhere else. A drive at a relative’s house, swapped every few months, or an online backup service.

A mirrored NAS is not a backup on its own. Mirroring covers a drive dying. It doesn’t cover deleting the wrong folder, a power surge, a flood or a burglary. The recordings you can live without. The photos you can’t: back those up first.

Playing it back

Any of the streamers on the streaming sticks page run the Plex and Jellyfin apps, as do most smart TVs and every phone in the house. Connect the server by cable if you can, see wifi fixes, because a HD recording of a hurling final is a heavier stream than most people expect.

Where this fits in the plan

A media server doesn’t replace a sports subscription; nothing records Sky Sports off an aerial, and nothing here is meant to. What it does is squeeze the most out of the bit that’s already free. Combine it with a good aerial, a dish for the UK channels, and a service subscribed for the months you need, and you’ve got the setup the dodgy box was pretending to be. The finder works out the subscription side.