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

  • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I use a Synology nas. It also runs pihole, and is my back up for photos and videos etc. as well as my network file server and can be my VPN as needed when using public hot spots.

    I’m not currently running the arrs on it too, but I plan to. They are already set up on my PC, so next time i need to change anything, I’ll load them on the nas. None are particularly resource intensive, but need more than a pi.

    I recommend looking at what your overall needs are. Will you do any more than serving locally. Do the other features of a nas appeal? For me, running a 24/7 laptop is more inefficient and I don’t have a spare, like you. A nas was pretty cheap with other features I use.

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Only you? A pi is fine.

      I struggle to recommend using such a low end device for any media serving related proprieties that might require transcoding.

      Even with the native Plex Media Server that my Shield TV Pro has and I being the main user it led to some undesired transcoding (like anime video files) making it struggle at times, which I consider is better suited than the Pi for these activities.

      Usually you want to avoid transcoding, but sooner or later you will face it, and if you have more users using your server then this scale grows.

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Technoguyfication@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        +1 for QuickSync. Intel 9th gen can transcode HEVC and they don’t have a transcode session limit like Nvidia. An i9-9900K will transcode a half dozen 4K streams without breaking a sweat. I don’t even run a GPU in my plex box anymore.

        If you’re running your media server in docker, make sure you pass /dev/dri into the container so it can find the GPU.

    • yokonzo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

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

      • nerdschleife@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

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

  • Fisch@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • maryjayjay@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • atomWood@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • yokonzo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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

      • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.