Jellyfin Media Server

[Auto Artisan]

I’m looking to buy and build a media server and run Jellyfin for streaming many of my BluRays and DVDs. Has anyone done anything similar? Budget is up to a £600.

[.:ian:.]

Depends if you want to transcode the files and how many devices you want to stream to.
If you dont want to transcode the files then almost anything will run jellyfin and serve the files.
Any of the n150 mini pcs will be more than man enough - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beelink-i5-8259U-Graphics...

If you want to transcode then ideally you want hardware encoding and if you want to stream to more than one device or stream 2k or 4k then you need a faster gpu.

The Ryzen 3200U in the device above (no idea why it says i5 in the url..) does apparently have hardware encoding, but you should check if this is supported by jellyfin and what resolution of file it will support (I suspect 1080p is the realistic limit)

[Dave Hedgehog]

and if you want a little power house of a box the K12 is a monster for the money, and a decent bazzite steam box as well

it has 3 M.2 sockets and can have an external GPU as well if want to play 4k AAA games

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/gmktec-k12-mini-p...

[simon_harris]

I've just bought a HP 285 g3 and installed Truenas on it, one of my intended apps to run is jellyfin. The machine cost me £80 and I already had a couple of 3tb drives to put in it for storage but even if I had bought new they are only a couple of hundred quid for the pair.

[the-norseman]

I run Jellyfin on my Fedora Dell XPS, I have copied loads of old DVD's and downloaded some movies. Put them in a /Media folder with subfolders for /movies and /TV and away I go.

I stream to Firesticks and Google TV devices.

[eeLee]

I run Jellyfin on a Dell micro system with an i5-6500T CPU with the storage being on two Synology NAS systems (UNC shares, important - as is the username connecting because you need to run the Jellyfin service with that).

Add to this there is Tailscale over which all of the data is served - to AppleTVs, iPads, browser and more (I mostly use Infuse which is a splendid interface).

It works really well but beware the software updates as it will go back to running and not connecting to your shares if data is not local.

I do not know about ripping DVDs but any modern machine will do it with Handbrake. It probably takes longer than downloading the torrent

[brokenaudi]

makeMKV is the best ripping option - you can re-encode if you want to with Handbrake.

THe makeMKV forum is great for info on hardware (dvd drives ) for best ripping.

I've got about 10-20TB of storage in my Plex server which is an old midi tower PC (will see if I can check the hardware) which had decent space for a selection of old spinning HDD - once you start ripping the full 4K extended LOTR you run of out storage quickly....

[Solocle]

I have a Jellyfin server, although it's only in its infancy. Spend on server hardware in total roughly £70.

[Suspicious_user]

Solocle said:

I have a Jellyfin server, although it's only in its infancy. Spend on server hardware in total roughly £70.

And another £70 a month in electricity bills.

[Auto Artisan]

Thanks I’ll have a look at them. Would something from UGREEN be okay?

[Alorotom]

Run mine on a permanently docked M2 MBA and it’s been faultless for a blend of concurrent streams running home and remote.

[Matty_]

I run Jellyfin from a NAS - works well to 1/2 devices, and can transcode as well. That being said, I probably wouldn't bother again and just get a miniPC as linked above. Only benefit of the NAS is the power usage is lower.

Suspicious_user said:

And another £70 a month in electricity bills.

they're also absurdly noisy. They're cheap to buy for a reason.

[Brainpox]

Great to see so many people running Jellyfin tbh. I run mine on the gaming PC as we don’t really have anywhere (or need) to have something running 24/7. I just put a couple of high capacity drives in it and connect to Infuse on AppleTV.

[.:ian:.]

Auto Artisan said:

Thanks I ll have a look at them. Would something from UGREEN be okay?

Post a link to the one you are considering.

[Solocle]

Matty_ said:

they're also absurdly noisy. They're cheap to buy for a reason.

Hence why it lives in the understairs cupboard, no real issue with it here

[paulrockliffe]

Matty_ said:

they're also absurdly noisy. They're cheap to buy for a reason.

They're not cheap anymore either, everything has gone nuts!

The energy consumption is a bit over blown though, mine falls firmly in that category as well and it doesn't really get too carried away, I think it's about £200 a year last time I checked. Half that if my wife asks.

It helps a lot if you're careful with the setup and keep the discs spun down as much as possible, especially if you end up with lots of them. They're not very efficient for running a Jellyfin server, but if that's all you're doing you might as well keep everything powered down unless you need it, but once you have it doing all the servery things, they make a lot of sense.

Don't forget if you keep them in a heated space, half the year they're offsetting your gas bill too, so there's no actual cost to running it.

[wombleh]

I have it running on a lenovo m700 mini PC that replaced my old microserver, with storage on a separate NAS. The PC was £70 and then stuck £40 of extra RAM in it. Not doing any transcoding, but does run a shed load of other things too.