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:
- I don’t know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD’s dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
- 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?).
- 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.
- 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?
If all you’re looking to do is setup a Jellyfin server that won’t do any transcoding, you could very easily use a raspberry pi with an external Hard Drive.
https://xyproblem.info/
Ah, okay. So, if I understand correctly, unless I’m trying to have Jellyfin do what YouTube does with offering multiple resolutions and bitrates for video, I don’t need to bother with looking for a GPU that’s good at video transcoding?
Or streaming to a device that doesn’t support your encoding. Something like an android tv that isn’t as flexible and may need on the fly transcoding. You can be careful to select a well supported encoding on the server if needed.
If you want to serve multiple resolutions and bitrates you will probably want hardware that can do transcoding. However basically any graphics card (even integrated) will be able to transcode a video stream in real-time at a decent quality.
(If you wanted you can try to pre-transcode offline, but Jellyfin doesn’t support this well)
Pretty much, so long as your clients support the
bitrate and resolution. (As others have said)see belowIt’s not the bitrate and resolution it’s the video and audio codecs that need to be supported.
This is a bad idea and not cost effective. Just buy a used minipc
Why is it a bad idea?
What the breakdown of cost of Pi (and accessories) vs mini pc? What’s the power consumption breakdown?
I’m certainly not say it has to be a Pi; I’m trying to point out that a Pi could host a Jellyfin server without transcoding.
It could but a Raspberry Pi these days will cost you $100 by the time you buy one, a case, a powers supply and SD card. Not to mention the raspberry pi does not have hardware acceleration so your CPU usage is going to be very high and your video may be choppy.
By comparison you can pickup a minipc for around the same price and it will be much more efficient as it has hardware acceleration.
How much does it cost in power to run the Pi? The computer?
I’ve got a Pi3B running Plex and, with one stream and no transcoding, there is no choppiness to any video.