Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server

AlecStewart1st@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 40 points –

Initial Thoughts

Hello friends!

This is something that's been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I'm also interested in the fact that there's a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google's position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.

Thing is I'd rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they're sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.

Completely wishful thinking setup

I'm not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here's my admittedly wishful thinking of what I'd like for a setup:

  • DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it's HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I've heard great things about those.
  • Jellyfin, obviously.
  • NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
  • Intel GPU, as I've heard they're very good at video decoding, but I've not looked into evidence of this.
  • Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
  • Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.

A few things with this:

  1. I don't know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD's dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
  2. God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
  3. I'd have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it's still something to look out for.
  4. Cost of hardware.

Wrap up

Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.

What are your recommendations?

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Feels like some of that stuff, like the SSD's are a bit overkill for a media server. Most of them still use spinning disks to maximize size vs. cost.

Additionally, the CPU/GPU needs of a media server are pretty minor, unless you need to transcode on the fly, and even then, single streams aren't very intensive either.

So unless you're capping the outgoing bandwidth to multiple external sources, you're most likely just streaming the video source as-is to the destination, which just needs a stable network stream. If you don't need to transcode at all, you don't really even need a GPU on the hardware.

I'm beginning to realize I haven't looked into this as much as I should've. 😅 So for most people, with what @AtariDump@lemmy.world has mentioned, a raspberry pi with 1 or multiple hard drives (if you really want) is a good start.

Price in a backup solution too, you don't want to have all your movies disappear because of one hard drive crash, or an accidental reformat gone wrong.

RAID is not a backup.

Good point. So what we're really talking about then is

  • something like a raspberry pi
  • 1 or 2 hard drives for base storage
  • 1 external hard drive as a backup

Hey, it happens. That’s why it’s great to be able to ask others for suggestions :)