hello,
I’m interested in setting up a jellyfin server that will only serve streams to TVs on my LAN. Files will be on an existing NAS. Usage will be low (probably just one stream at a time); cheap and reliable is the name of the game, and cheap includes power consumption. I am thinking of some kind of NUC but don’t know enough about jellyfin yet to decide on specs. Any recommendations for a specific NUC model or CPU/GPU? I assume I will be running linux - any distro recommendations?
Thin clients are the best for this. You can take your pick on an abundant of options on eBay.
Jellyfin isn’t that power hungry, and it would run on a rPi if you set it up right. You’re only problems are when it decides to transcoder file and you can get around that by using Kodi with the jellyfin add-on. (And choosing the native paths option. Kodi grabs all the data via, SMB, NFS, etc)
This way you can use Jellyfin as a media enrichment solution, not worry about the CPU or GPU encoding and just worry about watching everything.
If your clients don’t need transcoding then a Raspberry Pi 3 or higher is enough. That’s all I use and it is rock-solid with 3 simultaneous streams (possibly more but that’s all I’ve ever had a need for).
If your clients do need transcoding, personally I would recommend looking for a different client or using Tdarr to convert your media to a standard format that works without transcoding.
First off, if your clients can play the files natively, then anything capable of running Jellyfin will work. You only need specific hardware if you’re going to transcode streams.
If you need transcoding, especially if you’re going Intel, anything 8th Gen or newer will work.
As for your Linux distro, use whatever you’re most comfortable with. Ububtu LTS or an EL-clone are both popular choices.
I’m using a hp thin client, I got refurbished for 30 bucks of of eBay. Basically any thin client should be more than enough and they don’t draw much power. The question is how many streams are you looking to facilitate simultaneously and at what resolution. Even a raspberry pi should be enough if you are only looking to stream one video at 1080p but it will struggle at two (and if you don’t enable any hardware transcoding, you don’t stand any chance). If you need more than that, you’ll need something beefier
Does Jellyfin accept separate NAS well? If so, I’m about to buy one of those. And thanks for the suggestion!
Edit: or would it be best to just strap the hard drives to the thin client externally?
I have my media on hard drives strapped to the thin client externally but you should also be able to use an external nas. But I’ve never done that, so I can’t comment on how well that works. I’ve never seen anyone complain about such a setup though.
Btw: what nas are you using? Some NASs allow the direct installation of docker containers (Synology for example). So you could possibly run Jellyfin directly off your existing hardware
I don’t have one yet. I’m getting ready to build/buy one, but I’m still learning important things like this, and I want to buy something that works perfectly for me
I have Jellyfin running on a NUC which has mounted a few NFS shares that are hosted on my NAS, haven’t had any issues. I just added the nfs mounts to fstab and it works seamlessly.
You could certainly do worse for a nas than a thin client with hard drives. But you probably want to go for something where you can add you hard drives via SATA rather than usb. That being said I haven’t run into any issues with consumer grade usb-harddives (but I’m also cognicent of the fact, that I’m not using than the way there are intended).
As a OS for a thin client solution or a NAS build from scratch may I recommend OpenMediaVault? It’s basically just Debian but with a nice web UI on top to help you manage your system. You still have full command line access but the web UI helps you to configure your drives and create network shares.
If you install the community add-ons (OMV-Extras) you also gain the gain the possibility to install and manage docker containers graphically
The only thing to keep in mind is that omv requires a bigger harddrive than the NVME drive that comes with most thin client. So there is a good chance that you need to change that (which will set you back an additional 20 or so bucks)
I used an old Thin Client (HP t630) for exactly this. I didn’t used transcoding because all of it was used locally So it was fine.
Now i’m using a Lenovo Tiny with an Intel CPUs (i5 6500t) and some transcoding because i’m using it remote sometimes.
I used a fujitsu q9000 mini pc, a superold thing running first gen i3m chip. It was also undervolted but performed fine for 1080p streams. 8 gb ram 2tb
Recently I upgraded to a Nuc i3-8th gen, 16gb ram and a 4tb drive. It can handle 4k and is much faster at transcoding.
The NUC doesnt consume much and works pretty well. Its also a more quite and lived in a big ventilated closet.
Thanks for all the recommendations. I went with this:
https://www.bee-link.net/products/t4-pro
OS was Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It was surprising how easy it was to set up Jellyfin. I thought it would be a lot harder but it took very little effort.
I got an old laptop from my family for free and I turned it into my jellyfin server (among other home server-like duties). Power consumption is very low (7W idle, up to 28W when playing movies measured at the wall).
