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
I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 (with a lot of other stuff) and it works great. I’m only direct streaming tho, it’s too slow for transcode I think.
Consider how many devices will use it at the same time.
Only you? A pi is fine.
A few friends too? An old computer with a rough equivilent of i5-2300 with integrated graphics should do the trick. 4GB Ram will do fine.
A small group that’ll use it constantly? Plug in a GPU that supports hardware encoding, (Some low-end cards like GT 1030 doesnt support this feature, check this properly.) , upgrade RAM a notch more, like 8GB.
You can scale it higher for more people via logic; you’ll also know how much storage you’ll need; but it’ll be a lot if you want to satisfy a huge group of people.
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.
I’ve bought $10 Igel thin client with some quadcore AMD shitcessor. It runs very snappy, even transcodes (that is not snappy), but as I never need to transcode, it works very well for me. I’ve mounted my TV and Movie & music colections from my NAS with CIFS and it works very well.
It’s not that ras pi are not powerful enough, it’s more that they don’t have built in hardware encoding for h.264 and h.265. I currently use a pi4 and it “works” but I have a fancy encoding script that handles a queue. It’s not perfect and spoilers the CPU when processing. And I died a little when I read that the new pi doesn’t have it either. So in sort, make sure the video card\chip can encode and decode video and audio.
Supermicro latest H13 servers are good pieces of hardware. They also can run jellyfin. For optimal longevity, I recommend a Supermicro AS -2025HS-TNR fit with 2 9654, 12 dimms of 64GB DDR5, and 12 20TB HDDs.
So that would be my pick, with the stated requirements.
I mean if I’m looking at a raspberry pi first I think it would be a good assumption to make that £4,200 is a little out of my budget to run a FOSS media server, a little overkill even
No budget was stated, and I’m not gonna assume you don’t want a “good piece of hardware” because you looked at something 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. If I had the cash, I would definitely get one (or more!) of those bad boys, and would run all my infra on them… I might however in such case still look at an additional SBC just for plugging to the IPMI interfaces and turn the machines on and off at will.
You’ll be disappointed with an RPi any time you need to transcode. If you’re only going to be streaming locally and you know that all of your devices support DirectPlay, then great. Go ahead. But if you think you might need transcoding, then you’ll likely want to look elsewhere for something that will actually be able to keep up with transcoding.
Consider looking for something like an HP EliteDesk. You can pick up a refurb G5 model for anywhere from $200-$400. Hell, Amazon probably has refurbs even cheaper than that; They’re commonly used in office buildings for desk workers, then recycled when IT’s 3-year replacement cycle comes around. So there are a lot of used ones on the market, which have only been used for basic things like word processing and excel spreadsheets. The refurb is basically just a matter of adding a new SSD to it (because IT will have ripped the drive out when they recycled it) and giving it some new thermal paste and a blast of air. It’ll be beefy enough to run 2k transcoding decently, while still maintaining a MicroATX size.
Maybe throw an external case fan on it, since it’s passively cooled and tends to run warm? But that’s honestly optional, especially if you’re only using it for Jellyfin and the *arr suite.
It’s hard to make specific recommendations without knowing a budget. You mentioned the RPi so I’m assuming your budget is low. But I just wanted to caution you against the RPi, since you’ll quickly find that it is underpowered for video transcodes.
If you’re dead set on using an SBC for it, maybe something a little more powerful? I’m not super up-to-date on SBC stuff right now, but I know there are several competitors to RPi that offer better specs. The issue with competitors has (at least last time I looked at them) been with software support. The RPi dominates the market, so there is a lot of software written for it. But competitors have historically struggled to get the same kind of support, so you’ll want to do some research to make sure your particular SBC will actually have a decent distro available for Jellyfin.
That’s the exact one I upgraded to two weeks ago. Runs jelly, sonarr, radarr, bazaar, sabnzbget and overseerr with a 24tb lvm raid on USB. Barely touches the amount of RAM installed and live transcodes two 1080p movies simultaneously.
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I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 (with a lot of other stuff) and it works great. I’m only direct streaming tho, it’s too slow for transcode I think.
Consider how many devices will use it at the same time.
Only you? A pi is fine.
A few friends too? An old computer with a rough equivilent of i5-2300 with integrated graphics should do the trick. 4GB Ram will do fine.
A small group that’ll use it constantly? Plug in a GPU that supports hardware encoding, (Some low-end cards like GT 1030 doesnt support this feature, check this properly.) , upgrade RAM a notch more, like 8GB.
You can scale it higher for more people via logic; you’ll also know how much storage you’ll need; but it’ll be a lot if you want to satisfy a huge group of people.
Me and my girlfriend but honestly I think only one instance will be going at a time
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
I’ve bought $10 Igel thin client with some quadcore AMD shitcessor. It runs very snappy, even transcodes (that is not snappy), but as I never need to transcode, it works very well for me. I’ve mounted my TV and Movie & music colections from my NAS with CIFS and it works very well.
deleted by creator
I’m hosting mine on an old i5-750 (yeah, not 7500…), with an GeForce gt640 and 4GB of ram… Never encountered any problems whatsoever.
I would take a hot take and say, any old pc that you can find will do just fine.
It’s not that ras pi are not powerful enough, it’s more that they don’t have built in hardware encoding for h.264 and h.265. I currently use a pi4 and it “works” but I have a fancy encoding script that handles a queue. It’s not perfect and spoilers the CPU when processing. And I died a little when I read that the new pi doesn’t have it either. So in sort, make sure the video card\chip can encode and decode video and audio.
I just use and old laptop
I use a second-hand office fleet Thinkcentre m910q (with proxmox on bare metal then a bunch of VMs, including Ubuntu, which handles my Plex server).
Cost me about 150 AUD and I’m incredibly happy with it.
just grab one of your old laptops
Just have the one unfortunately and it’s got other uses, may stop by goodwill and see if ones availible
Supermicro latest H13 servers are good pieces of hardware. They also can run jellyfin. For optimal longevity, I recommend a Supermicro AS -2025HS-TNR fit with 2 9654, 12 dimms of 64GB DDR5, and 12 20TB HDDs.
So that would be my pick, with the stated requirements.
I mean if I’m looking at a raspberry pi first I think it would be a good assumption to make that £4,200 is a little out of my budget to run a FOSS media server, a little overkill even
No budget was stated, and I’m not gonna assume you don’t want a “good piece of hardware” because you looked at something 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. If I had the cash, I would definitely get one (or more!) of those bad boys, and would run all my infra on them… I might however in such case still look at an additional SBC just for plugging to the IPMI interfaces and turn the machines on and off at will.
You’ll be disappointed with an RPi any time you need to transcode. If you’re only going to be streaming locally and you know that all of your devices support DirectPlay, then great. Go ahead. But if you think you might need transcoding, then you’ll likely want to look elsewhere for something that will actually be able to keep up with transcoding.
Consider looking for something like an HP EliteDesk. You can pick up a refurb G5 model for anywhere from $200-$400. Hell, Amazon probably has refurbs even cheaper than that; They’re commonly used in office buildings for desk workers, then recycled when IT’s 3-year replacement cycle comes around. So there are a lot of used ones on the market, which have only been used for basic things like word processing and excel spreadsheets. The refurb is basically just a matter of adding a new SSD to it (because IT will have ripped the drive out when they recycled it) and giving it some new thermal paste and a blast of air. It’ll be beefy enough to run 2k transcoding decently, while still maintaining a MicroATX size.
Maybe throw an external case fan on it, since it’s passively cooled and tends to run warm? But that’s honestly optional, especially if you’re only using it for Jellyfin and the *arr suite.
It’s hard to make specific recommendations without knowing a budget. You mentioned the RPi so I’m assuming your budget is low. But I just wanted to caution you against the RPi, since you’ll quickly find that it is underpowered for video transcodes.
If you’re dead set on using an SBC for it, maybe something a little more powerful? I’m not super up-to-date on SBC stuff right now, but I know there are several competitors to RPi that offer better specs. The issue with competitors has (at least last time I looked at them) been with software support. The RPi dominates the market, so there is a lot of software written for it. But competitors have historically struggled to get the same kind of support, so you’ll want to do some research to make sure your particular SBC will actually have a decent distro available for Jellyfin.
I been using a Intel n100, you can get a box for just over $100 and use a cheap USB 10TB HDD.
Someone did the math at /r/Plex and an N100 based Intel mini pc was the most efficient.
It has hardware transcoding support and uses under 10W of power
EDIT: found the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1ae6683/intel_n100_vs_ryzen_7_1700_1st_gen_an_interesting/
Like this?
Yea, I think there was one from MSI too and a dozen other manufacturers on Amazon, eBay and AliExpress.
That’s the exact one I upgraded to two weeks ago. Runs jelly, sonarr, radarr, bazaar, sabnzbget and overseerr with a 24tb lvm raid on USB. Barely touches the amount of RAM installed and live transcodes two 1080p movies simultaneously.