What's a good setup to run jellyfin on. I currently run it on a Linux desktop. I tried running it on a raspberry pi, but it felt like it was struggling. Did I expect too much?
It depends on whether you are willing to trade storage space for compute. The raspberry pi struggles happen when real-time transcoding is taking place. If you change the settings or pre-transcode everything, then it will easily run on the pi.
If you would rather use compute than storage, then a desktop is a good plan. I run my jellyfin on my desktop and use cloudflare tunnel for making it available online as needed. That said, me and my family are the only users of my instance, so access through the internet is not the primary way. I only set that up for when we are traveling.
I've found that a cheap Dell Wyse 5070 is more than sufficient at less than £50.
Pentium J5005, only quad core and no hyper threading, but it is Gemini Lake refresh so can do QuickSync without actually using the CPU. I believe it is something like 10 realtime 1080p re-encoding streams simultaneously. 2-4 4k re-encodes but I've not tested it that much.
Multiple USB 3.1 for hooking D4-400s to for ZFS, and two ram slots that claim a max of 8 GB but mines doing fine with 32GB.
> Multiple USB 3.1 for hooking D4-400s to for ZFS, and two ram slots that claim a max of 8 GB but mines doing fine with 32GB.
FYI: running ZFS (or any server storage) on eHDDs isn't a recommended practice[0]. A lot of things can go wrong and, if mine are anything to go by, they don't pass SMART data back to the host.
If you're running multiple HDDs, a decent HBA may be a good investment. They slot into a PCiE slot, and allow you to connect HDDs to them. From memory, I believe the LSI cards are considered the most reliable.
I heard that a number of times but I am using a professional external HDD and my ZFS pool with it is quite stable for ~2.5 years now.
I'd wager much more people are doing ZFS + external drives than many people think -- it's very convenient and that trumps recommendations, it seems.
I am aiming to have a proper server OneDay™ and will make sure I get one with enough PCIe lanes so I can have several slots for 4-6 HDDs or SATA SSDs but in the meantime a simple thin client + a professional external HDD has been getting the job done amazingly well.
Ahh, in that case I'm very happy to be called out on that. I have a few Seagate ones from various generations, and none of them pass any SMART data. It's quite infuriating.
I have a Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini running next to me that is great. Able to setup hardware acceleration on it for any transcoding needs too. It's nice and small which was the big selling point. You can probably go cheaper, but I got it around Black Friday with some nurse discounts that Lenovo gives (thanks wife).
Jellyfin is fine if you direct stream only, but any form of transcoding will kill your server. It is a bit hard to get other people to download the desktop Jellyfin Media Player or Infuse on iOS, and I don't think Android has a version of the app with massive codec support.
Jellyfin does fine transcoding 4k on my decade old i7. And it'd probably be a hassle to install it on other people's phones, but the Android app can use MPV as it's media player
I have no detailed info for you but heard from people on Reddit that depending on what the host's CPU and GPU support, Jellyfin will do transcoding which yeah, it proves too much for a RPi.
You can use something like "Acer Aspire XC - Desktop Intel Celeron J4125 2GHz 4GB RAM 256GB SSD W10H" which is sometimes on sale on ebay for $100-150. Then throw a few small upgrades in there (larger drive, maybe some memory) and you will have a very quiet, low power media center.
I had it running on a Synology DS218+ (Celeron J3355) with no problems for a long time. Now I've got it running on a framework mainboard (i7-1165G7) with a bunch of other things.
If you would rather use compute than storage, then a desktop is a good plan. I run my jellyfin on my desktop and use cloudflare tunnel for making it available online as needed. That said, me and my family are the only users of my instance, so access through the internet is not the primary way. I only set that up for when we are traveling.