Within a single week, Jellyfin saw three of its most experienced maintainers leave, including long-time project leader Joshua Boniface, who stepped down citing burnout. The project then settled a long-running versioning question and will jump straight to 12.0 — here is what that means for your server.
In early August 2026, Trakt began requiring a $4.99/month VIP subscription to create API applications, and existing keys are vanishing. The self-hosted ecosystem that syncs Plex, Jellyfin and Kodi with Trakt is discovering its dependence on a third-party service that is no longer free.
FFmpeg 9.0 landed on August 3, 2026 with expanded Vulkan acceleration, an Animated WebP decoder, and an ONNX Runtime backend. Here's what this major release actually changes for your self-hosted media stack.
On April 29, 2025, Plex doubled its lifetime price to $249.99 and killed free remote streaming. One year later, Jellyfin has crossed 50,000 GitHub stars, 360 million Docker pulls, and 51% market share among self-hosters. If you own a server and a media collection, paying to stream it no longer makes sense.
