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Jellyfin

Free software media system for organizing and streaming your movies, TV shows, and music

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Alternative to: netflix, plex, emby

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v12.0-rc1

2026-06-21

:rocket: Jellyfin Server 12.0 RC1

We are pleased to announce the first release candidate preview release of Jellyfin 12.0!

This is a preview release, intended for those interested in testing 12.0 before it’s final public release. We welcome testers to help find as many bugs as we can before the final release.

As always, please ensure you stop your Jellyfin server and take a full backup before upgrading!

A note about versioning

Starting with this release, we are dropping the preceeding 10. from our versioning. Thus, 10.11.x -> [10.]12.x = 12.x. The reason is simple: at this point in the project, we don’t envision a hard break in the API like we planned way back in the early days, and this version scheme was causing a lot of confusion amongst users about what a “major” release was.

Thus, we are now on two digits:

  • The first digit is the major release. Expect signifiant changes between major releases. Do not ever auto-update to a new major release without first checking the release notes, and always take a backup of your server data and config before a major release upgrade.
  • The second digit is the minor release. These are primarily bug and security fix releases, and do not introduce significant feature or functionality changes. You can, usually, safely auto-update between minor releases and should not need a full backup, but it is prudent just in case. You should also ALWAYS strive to run the latest point release as security fixes are embargo’d for at most 2 weeks after the release.

What’s new?

The main goal of this release has been performance. 10.11.0 dropped a major backend rewrite, and while it was broadly functional, it had a lot of rough edges. This release seeks to polish out most of those rough edges and bring better performance to all users.

There are many other small fixes, improvements, changes, and translations. See our draft release notes here or below for the full list of pull requests.

Note: You must be on Jellyfin 10.11.x (ideally, 10.11.11) before upgrading! If you are not, the upgrade will fail. I have been informed that I was wrong here, and upgrades from 10.10.7 are also possible, same as 10.11.x!

Note: The initial load of Jellyfin 12.x will run a few migrations and will take several minutes. Please be patient and do not interrupt the process.

Note: If you install the RC, you should disable all plugins and reinstall using the unstable plugin repository, or plugins may fail to load and cause unintended side effects.

Installing

This preview release is distributed in all our traditional forms, though not automatically via our Apt repository or latest tag.

  • For all non-Docker environments, you can find the files for manual download in our repository by selecting “Stable Preview” for your OS.
  • For Docker, you can pull the 12.0-rc1 or preview tags.

What’s Changed (since v10.11.x)

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/compare/v10.11.11…v12.0-rc1

Changelog on GitHub →