I am pretty new at all this. But I got jellyfin and such setup on my window box. I have a roku client and all that working. So now it is time to look into a standalone box to run 24/7. But I don’t know what specs matter.
I have read that I need at least a 6th gen intel i7 or i5 to take advantage of a feature that helps with this sort of thing.
But outside of that. Does ram matter? How much of a drive do I need on the box? (Going to get a NAS for real storage). Any other specs that matter? I am hoping to go fanless (not because I know anything, but cause I want it to be silent), is that ok? And which flavor of linux is the most popular?
Cpu, ram, etc only really matter if you do a lot of transcoding. Otherwise, Jellyfin does and uses very little.
If you have a system that supports hardware transcoding (like most Intel cpus QSV), then you can get by with very little again. Otherwise, you need a lot more for software transcoding.
Storage space: a couple GB is plenty.
Linux: in general? Debian, maybe? But it doesn’t really matter when you can also run it in a Docker container. Just pick something that’s user-friendly for you.
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Thanks for the great info. It helped correct a lot of things I had wrong in my head. One odd thing occurred to me. Should I be using a NAS? If the NAS is for storing media, and all the clients will be going through jellyfin on the server, shouldn’t I just put the storage in the server? Seems like everything I read talks about having a NAS for a media server though, so I assume I am missing something.
My plan was to run linux and use docker to run the actual software. I have a decades of experience “using” linux, but while I technically administer linux boxes for work, I’ve never had to really dig deep. They are all in the cloud, so if things go wonky, you just setup a new instance. We use kubernetes and docker also. So linux and docker seem like they should be very doable for me, and even a great learning opportunity. I really should understand docker better in my line of work. :) So no need for a fancy UI on the box. Other than initial setup, I will probably just be SSH’ing into it.
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Thanks. I don’t have anything leftover lieing around. I have two kids and used up all my old stuff to make computers for them during the pandemic. So right now I am seeing things on the internet saying to buy a NUC as the server. At least that should be pretty quite. And then add on a NAS. I will have to consider just building a PC and giving it a ton of storage though. Might not be much cheaper though, and certainly would be more work.
6th gen works, 8th gen and up works better.
As long as you have enough RAM, you won’t get much more speed. 4GB should be enough. A minimal Linux install plus Jellyfin takes less than 16GB on disk, and anything is fast enough.
Fanless Intel runs a little hot for my taste, but it’s your build. I’ve run tiny/mini/micro systems that were virtually silent but still had a CPU fan to help move heat out.
Go at least 8th gen. The computing improvement is insane vs 6th gen. My server runs in an 8th gen.
I set my server to power cycle each day and be off for a few hours to prevent my self from any issues with the mono runtime that jellyfin is using.
I wonder if .net is on the roadmap…
Odd, I only have to reboot mine for updates. Other than that it seems fine running on a Linux VM with 2GB RAM, after the initial setup.
And it uses the dotNet runtime 6 so I’m unclear on what roadmap you refer to.
On Linux is Jellyfin updated to use .NEt or is it still on mono.
As far as I can tell, it has always used the dotNet 6 framework.
Oh nice, I better check to make sure my server isn’t running some weird version, thanks 👍
I just check the git page, it’s now using .net 8. Which is great. Maybe I can turn off the rebooting then. I did this to protect my self from mono lol.
I have a Beelink Celeron N100 box with 16GB RAM and the thing transcodes like a beast with Quicksync. An i5 or i7 is overkill IMO and will just give you higher power draw