Self-Hosted Main

Fyi this sub here is about selfhosting software services, not about any hardware purchase or upgrade advice.

Consider subs like /r/HomeServer /r/Homelab /r/BuildaPC for that.

Very odd: on my computer it never uses more than 1GB of RAM. As for the limitations of your first setup, that sounds like a bottleneck when it comes to transcoding, which can occur because of a lack of GPU or CPU power, depending on whether or not you had hardware acceleration enabled. I would expect it to run much better on your new setup, but the RAM thing is worth investigating. I was running Jellyfin on 12GB of RAM until recently, and never hit 100% usage.

Are you running any 4k content or just 1080p? How many users?

I run Plex on an N100 MiniPC, including hardware transcoding. I have the media in another system running TrueNAS.

There are a TON of ways you can do this. Since you have a NAS already it makes it super easy. You just need a tiny desktop for about $100 and you are golden.

Look on ebay for one of those mini desktops from HP/Dell/Lenovo. The one thing though is you will need to find one that has a CPU that supports quicksync. So 7th gen or newer. So you want to find as far up the chain as you can.

They are:

1. HP Prodesk
2. Dell Optiplex
3. Lenovo Thinkcenter

This is the cheapest way to get away with it.

There may also be an option to use one of the Intel Arc cards with a cheaply built desktop for quicksync support. But I have not seen anything related to comparing them to on die quicksync. I would be especially curious on the cheaper option from Arc and how well it works for video encoding.

I am using a cheap custom setup with a Ryzen 3600 and 16 GB of ram with TrueNas and works ok. Jellyfin takes a few seconds to get started but runs fine otherwise. I can even run 4k streams but only works smoothly if i encode them with the fast decode option. This was very cheap because of the old hardware, about $300 before the drives.

The only thing I would change is to get a CPU with integrated graphics. Some can help with decoding and massively simplifies the first time setup.

I run Jellyfin on a laptop that was too slow to use for anything else and an external hard drive. Intel Celeron N3060, 2 cores, 2 threads, less than 4gb ram, 32gb eMMC storage.

Running Jellyfin on a 5th gen i5 that I've had sitting in a closet for years doing nothing.

Running Ubuntu with 16 gb of ram. Transcodes single streams just fine. Most of my files are MP4 anyway. I run everything at 1080.

I ran for a bit on a Raspberry Pi 4. That seemed a bit strained, but OK.

I didn't like the reliability of the Pi.

I run my truenas scale on a 17-4790 32gb ddr3 and run plex on it. Use a 1060 3gb for transcoding

I'm using a raspberry pi 4 8 GB. It's not a problem until someone transcodes, and that usually happens with H265 HEVC media when the person is on a browser that doesn't support it which is most browsers these days. If the person is doing directplay (click the gear during play and click on Playback Info). If it's forced to transcode, it will tell you why.

Direct-play in native resolution and codec should give you perfect performance and consume almost no resources since it's essentially just a file transfer. I find performance works best when I use the Jellyfin Media Player app on my computer or the Android app.

running on a single core 2 gig cloud server. just set filter to h264 so there is no transcoding.

works for me.

I bought a used computer off of Facebook marketplace for $200. It has a Xeon processor from 2014 and 2 TB of hard drive space and works like a charm. I can add 2 more 4 TB drives if I want.

Something is wrong if Jellyfin is using more than 2gb max.

I use a beelink mini s w/ an N5095 Jasper Lake processor and 8GB RAM. Hardware acceleration supported for the vast majority of my media, and I can do 2-3 simultaneous streams without issue (I haven't tested higher since it's usually just my wife and I streaming).

I use a stack of old, retired laptops, including one from 2010, that I installed Gentoo on and setup Xen as the Dom0 hypervisor. From there, Podman and Kubernetes, and then containerized plex. I've never had any problems.

How is your RAM being used? Look at CPU-X in the "System" tab. If the memory is mostly used for buffers and cache then it's not a problem, you want it to be used like that.

I ran my NAS for years off an i5 (Kaby Lake) with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of NVMe storage and it handled any of the usual media servers just fine. I've used them all, Plex, Emby and now Jellyfin.

Have a look at this table, get the cheapest used Intel CPU you can find that fits your transcoding requirements, slap it on a board with enough SATA connectors and 4 GB of RAM and you should be good to go.

Docker should not have a large impact, I have 15 containers running right now and they only use 2.5 GB of RAM in total (for reals, without buffers/cache).

Running Emby on my TS-251+ with 2gb of ram.

Could be snappier when browsing my library but not a single issue streaming 1080p.

Raspberry pi 4 (4gb) with only direct stream/direct play. Works perfectly as long as the media is compatible

I run Plex in Unraid on a 6th Gen i7 with zero perf issues and also only using the iGPU. Multiple concurrent streams no problem.

Jellyfin on an Oracle Free tier instance, all your media encoded h.264 mp4 aac and stored on a cloud service like Mega. Total cost $100/ year - no electricity usage, 100% uptime, static IP.

Probably a used enterprise HP/Lenovo/Dell mini or sff pc (e.g. Hp Elitedesk or Lenovo thinkcentre). The 7th gen Intel CPU's would be the sweet spot between price and streaming performance I think. They can be had for $50-80.

Raspberry pi zero is the cheapest server I ever built. It ran like crap but it was fine for hosting any audio. My idea was to just have it with a usb drive plugged in hosting away but then I figured I may as well just use my Mac because it was on anyway.

Running Jellyfin on my old Pentium E5200 (dual core), 4 GiB memory. I use FreeBSD with ZFS, but I use AppJail to manage my FreeBSD containers (>15). It works very well. There is no performance difference between containers and host (at least on FreeBSD): Jellyfin consumes up to 400-500 MiB of memory with a single client, a bit more when some other client wants to play a movie, but in general I use movian on my PS3 or the Jellyfin app on my android device. When I rewind or fast forward the movie it only hangs 1 or 2 seconds depending on network traffic (in general the rate is low) but I think the Jellyfin app or Movian prefetch chunks of the movie and caches it to improve performance a bit. I think the other thing that helps me not to consume a lot of my resources is that my movies are usually of decent quality, but not the best, as they are either classics or too recent to be of decent quality.

I don't test the following because I don't need to, but maybe it can be useful to you:

• https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg
• https://github.com/aleksasiriski/rffmpeg-go
• https://github.com/Shadowghost/jellyfin-rffmpeg

I run Plex and Jellyfin and about 20 other containers in 8GB. They perform really well even though Plex doesn't support hardware transcoding. I only have an i5 7500.