I’m wanting to set up my external Seagate drive with all my media on it to run a jellyfin server but I’m not sure which device to use. I’m thinking a raspberry pi but I’m not sure which one. From what I can tell from running the server on my laptop it is fairly CPU intensive for lower end systems

Edit: so general consensus seems to be, don’t use a pi, it’s not powerful enough

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    263·
    1 year ago

    Consider how many devices will use it at the same time.

    Only you? A pi is fine.

    A few friends too? An old computer with a rough equivilent of i5-2300 with integrated graphics should do the trick. 4GB Ram will do fine.

    A small group that’ll use it constantly? Plug in a GPU that supports hardware encoding, (Some low-end cards like GT 1030 doesnt support this feature, check this properly.) , upgrade RAM a notch more, like 8GB.

    You can scale it higher for more people via logic; you’ll also know how much storage you’ll need; but it’ll be a lot if you want to satisfy a huge group of people.

    • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Only you? A pi is fine.

      I struggle to recommend using such a low end device for any media serving related proprieties that might require transcoding.

      Even with the native Plex Media Server that my Shield TV Pro has and I being the main user it led to some undesired transcoding (like anime video files) making it struggle at times, which I consider is better suited than the Pi for these activities.

      Usually you want to avoid transcoding, but sooner or later you will face it, and if you have more users using your server then this scale grows.

    • yokonzo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Me and my girlfriend but honestly I think only one instance will be going at a time

      • nerdschleife@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        I use a raspberry pi 4 with 3 simultaneous sessions sometimes. Direct play, it works fine. It can’t transcode at all, though.

      • habitualTartare@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        If space isn’t an issue, getting a cheap office surplus machine like a Dell Optiplex SFF line for ~$100 US vs the USFF so that it supports low profile PCI-E for a hba card for more storage, or nvidia quadro p400 for better encoding at like $30-50.

        It will probably use a bit more wattage, especially with more HDDs, but still should be around 50w idle for even the old systems.