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
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.
+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.
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.
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 second that. I did reinstall it recently though, the whole system, and switched to docker for Jellyin. I noticed a few new movies are transcoding now and for one stream it is actually bearable. But I have no idea why it didn’t work on my first install and why it is working now.
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.
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/
Yea, I think there was one from MSI too and a dozen other manufacturers on Amazon, eBay and AliExpress.
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.
Low-end AMD APU will blow any Intel away for this purpose and also have hardware transcoding capabilities.
Per Jellyfin’s hardware guide, that’s only for recent AMD CPUs. If we’re looking at budget options (as OP seems to be heading), then we can go with older, used Intel CPUs.
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.
I’ve got it running in a docker container on my Synology, but I’ve been experimenting with a Raspberry Pi 4… and to all those on here talking about how the Pi can’t transcode, you have to do some work to enable hardware transcoding. I went through a whole bunch, but here’s a summary someone else wrote up: https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/ei6ew6/rpi4_hardware_acceleration_guide/
It makes a huge difference. ffmpeg normally is like 8fps, with HW accel, it’s like 50+. It’s why I’m playing with it. Lower power draw and the Synology I’ve got it on now has no HW acceleration and is old and crusty.
