What's a good piece of hardware to run a jellyfin server?

yokonzo@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 107 points –

I'm wanting to set up my external Seagate drive with all my media on it to run a jellyfin server but I'm not sure which device to use. I'm thinking a raspberry pi but I'm not sure which one. From what I can tell from running the server on my laptop it is fairly CPU intensive for lower end systems

Edit: so general consensus seems to be, don't use a pi, it's not powerful enough

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Me and my girlfriend but honestly I think only one instance will be going at a time

I use a raspberry pi 4 with 3 simultaneous sessions sometimes. Direct play, it works fine. It can't transcode at all, though.

Same. Works fine as long as it's x264 content

I second that. I did reinstall it recently though, the whole system, and switched to docker for Jellyin. I noticed a few new movies are transcoding now and for one stream it is actually bearable. But I have no idea why it didn't work on my first install and why it is working now.

If space isn't an issue, getting a cheap office surplus machine like a Dell Optiplex SFF line for ~$100 US vs the USFF so that it supports low profile PCI-E for a hba card for more storage, or nvidia quadro p400 for better encoding at like $30-50.

It will probably use a bit more wattage, especially with more HDDs, but still should be around 50w idle for even the old systems.

Yeah no we live in a tiny 700 sq ft apartment lol, smaller is better

If they're getting a used desktop (unless it's really old), it probably already has an Intel CPU with a decent enough integrated GPU to do transcoding without the GPU. Not only will that save OP money on their setup, but also on their power bill.