I've been using Jellyfin for about two years now, and I was a Plex user before that. In the last two years, I've never missed Plex once because Jellyfin is so good. It’s a capable media server out of the box, which streams your library, organizes your content, and runs on almost anything.

But Jellyfin is also a bit vanilla. The home screen is boring, the interface is fixed, and playback lacks the small quality-of-life touches that streaming services have normalized over the past decade. However, the massive community behind Jellyfin ensures that it doesn’t stay that way. Jellyfin’s plugin ecosystem is massive, and, in fact, these plugins enable features that would otherwise be paid for on platforms like Plex. Four, in particular, shifts Jellyfin from a functional media server into something that’s more polished.

Home Screen Sections

Take control over the Jellyfin home screen

I don't mean to complain, but the stock Jellyfin home screen is a bit generic, and it also makes it hard to discover or watch content once you have a lot in your library. It's a vertical stack of library rows (Continue Watching, Latest Movies, Latest Shows) arranged by the server, and you can't even change how some rows are arranged. While this is fine if you only have a very small library, for those with large ones with multiple content types, it becomes a scroll-heavy guessing game.

Home Screen Sections replaces the vanilla home screen entirely with a modular alternative. Rather than tweaking the existing layout, it swaps it out for one you configure yourself through a Modular Home settings page accessible from the hamburger menu. You choose which sections appear, in what order, and the result can look quite different from the default, including Netflix-style rows like Because You Watched and Watch Again that are not available in stock Jellyfin.

Home Screen Sections requires two additional plugins to function, File Transformation and Plugin Pages, and the plugin is not in the official Jellyfin catalogue. You install it by first adding the developer's custom repository to your server. It’s also worth noting that this plugin currently only works with web-based interfaces and is still under active development. You can submit feature requests on the developer’s website and report bugs via GitHub.

Skin Manager

Give Jellyfin a more polished look

Jellyfin ships with a default interface that is functional and reasonably clean, but unmistakably self-hosted software. It is fine for power users but less welcoming for anyone who sits down expecting something closer to a polished streaming app.

Skin Manager is a plugin that lets you install and switch between community-built themes without touching CSS files or manually editing configuration. Once installed, you open the plugin settings, pick a skin, and click Set Skin. The plugin ships with eight preconfigured themes, and you can preview them before applying. Popular community skins include Ultrachromic, a dark high-contrast theme with strong typography, and Monochrome, which suits OLED screens well. JellyFlix is another widely used option that leans into a Netflix-inspired layout with bold typography and red accents.

InPlayerEpisodePreview

Add an episode preview list to the player

On most streaming platforms, you can browse the season without leaving the player. You see every episode, its thumbnail, its description, and your progress through it. Stock Jellyfin does not offer this. If you want to check what episode comes next or jump back two episodes, you exit the player, navigate the library, and re-enter playback.

In-Player Episode Preview solves this by adding an episode panel directly inside the video player. During playback, you can open the panel to see every episode in the current season, with thumbnails, titles, descriptions, community ratings, and your playback progress for each. You can switch between seasons from the same panel, mark episodes as watched or add them to favorites, and start a new episode without ever leaving the player.

The plugin works with both the Jellyfin Web Client and the Jellyfin Media Player desktop client. It's installed by adding the plugin's custom manifest to your server as a repository, then installing from the catalog. The developer also recommends installing File Transformation to avoid permission issues during setup for certain installation types.

Intro Skipper

It skips intros (and post credits)

Most TV shows include a title sequence that runs between 30 and 90 seconds at the start of each episode. Watching it once is fine. Watching it across a ten-episode series in a weekend becomes repetitive enough that the skip button on streaming platforms has become one of the most-used interface elements in the industry.

Intro Skipper brings that behavior to Jellyfin. The plugin analyses audio fingerprints across episodes in a series to identify recurring segments. When a matching segment is detected during playback, a Skip Intro button appears on-screen. Clicking it skips the sequence and goes straight to the start of the episode's actual content.

The detection is automatic and runs as a background task after new content is added. Accuracy is high for shows with consistent intros, and the plugin allows manual timestamp adjustment for edge cases where detection is imprecise. You can also configure whether the button appears by default or auto-skips after a countdown.

Credit skipping works on the same fingerprinting logic and is particularly useful for shows where the credits roll over content rather than a black screen. Some series use this space for post-credit scenes, so the manual override is worth keeping accessible.

Jellyfin has a lot to offer

Jellyfin is such a nice tool that it’s surprising it’s free. I don’t mean to jinx it, but it has everything you need, and it’s open source. You can self-host it, and there’s a huge range of plugins. If you don’t see a feature in the app, there’s probably a plugin for it. On the other hand, Plex continues to put many of its features behind a paywall while remaining closed source.