Initial Thoughts
Hello friends!
This is something that's been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I'm also interested in the fact that there's a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google's position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.
Thing is I'd rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they're sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.
Completely wishful thinking setup
I'm not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here's my admittedly wishful thinking of what I'd like for a setup:
- DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it's HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I've heard great things about those.
- Jellyfin, obviously.
- NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
- Intel GPU, as I've heard they're very good at video decoding, but I've not looked into evidence of this.
- Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
- Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.
A few things with this:
- I don't know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD's dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
- God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
- I'd have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it's still something to look out for.
- Cost of hardware.
Wrap up
Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.
What are your recommendations?
If you really want Intel, just get an N100 or N300. Low power, Intel HW transcoding on iGPU on Linux kernels 6.3+, and can handle Jellyfin no problem. You can get a minipc with everything you for $175 for a no name brand, or maybe $250 for a more well-known brand.
Didn't think about that either. I'm finding I didn't give this as much thought as I should've.
But why do that when I could spend +$600? 😜
If you're gonna spend that level of money, you may as well go for an M1 Mac Mini. MacOS is a Unix flavor and in the new 10.9 version of Jellyfin it actually has the best hardware transcoding support. The M-series chips are video processing beasts for the money/electricity
I was joking. I don't feel like shelling out $600 for a starting media server.
I just recently put in an N100 mini PC to run as a Plex server. Cost me about £160, pulls all of 6W when idle, and it doesn't break a sweat when transcoding no matter what I throw at it. As a media server I can't recommend them highly enough.
I have a few random brand ones that run just fine. Just keep backups.