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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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.
Any more recent Intel CPU with quicksync works well too. I have a $100 CAD i3 powering Jellyfin and it’s able to handle ~5 1080p streams going at a time without any issues.
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.
I just use and old laptop
I been using a Intel n100, you can get a box for just over $100 and use a cheap USB 10TB HDD.
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.
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.
If you can get a 7th gen Intel or even a halfway decent basic El cheapo Nvidia card then that will help with transcoding but outside of that anything that runs the interface should be fine.
You don’t even need 7th gen. My i7 920 could run it without breaking a sweat.
The reason why I said 7th gen is because the built-in graphics card can do some pretty good quality transcoding.
It’s also nice because on the used market there’s quite a few i3 and i5 based 7th gen PCs available for a hundred and change.
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.
You’ll be disappointed with an RPi any time you need to transcode. Consider looking for something like an HP EliteDesk. You can pick up a refurb G5 model for ~$400. It’ll be beefy enough to run 2k transcoding, 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 Plex.
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.
A Raspberry Pi will work as a Jellyfin server, but it will really struggle if it has to transcode any media.
If you want your Jellyfin server to be up and accessible at all times, I would suggest getting a second hand PC. I’m personally a fan of small form factor mini PCs. Anything with a 7th gen Intel processor or newer, with integrated graphics, will be able to hardware transcode anything but AV1.
Jellyfin server itself isn’t all that intensive. My “server” is running on a 13y/o low-end desktop CPU (Pentium E5800, in case you’re curious). However, if you noticed your laptop struggling, as others have pointed out, that’s probably when it was transcoding. While I want eventually update my server with transcoding hardware, I just disabled transcoding completely for now, and it’s pretty workable.
What’s the point of transcoding for local serving?
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.
