Technology

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.

Someone did the math at /r/Plex and an N100 based Intel mini pc was the most efficient.

It has hardware transcoding support and uses under 10W of power

EDIT: found the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1ae6683/intel_n100_vs_ryzen_7_1700_1st_gen_an_interesting/

A Raspberry Pi will work as a Jellyfin server, but it will really struggle if it has to transcode any media.

If you want your Jellyfin server to be up and accessible at all times, I would suggest getting a second hand PC. I’m personally a fan of small form factor mini PCs. Anything with a 7th gen Intel processor or newer, with integrated graphics, will be able to hardware transcode anything but AV1.

If you can get a 7th gen Intel or even a halfway decent basic El cheapo Nvidia card then that will help with transcoding but outside of that anything that runs the interface should be fine.

I’ve got it running in a docker container on my Synology, but I’ve been experimenting with a Raspberry Pi 4… and to all those on here talking about how the Pi can’t transcode, you have to do some work to enable hardware transcoding. I went through a whole bunch, but here’s a summary someone else wrote up: https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/ei6ew6/rpi4_hardware_acceleration_guide/

It makes a huge difference. ffmpeg normally is like 8fps, with HW accel, it’s like 50+. It’s why I’m playing with it. Lower power draw and the Synology I’ve got it on now has no HW acceleration and is old and crusty.

Jellyfin server itself isn't all that intensive. My "server" is running on a 13y/o low-end desktop CPU (Pentium E5800, in case you're curious). However, if you noticed your laptop struggling, as others have pointed out, that's probably when it was transcoding. While I want eventually update my server with transcoding hardware, I just disabled transcoding completely for now, and it's pretty workable.

I just use and old laptop

I use a second-hand office fleet Thinkcentre m910q (with proxmox on bare metal then a bunch of VMs, including Ubuntu, which handles my Plex server).

Cost me about 150 AUD and I'm incredibly happy with it.

I use a Synology nas. It also runs pihole, and is my back up for photos and videos etc. as well as my network file server and can be my VPN as needed when using public hot spots.

I'm not currently running the arrs on it too, but I plan to. They are already set up on my PC, so next time i need to change anything, I'll load them on the nas. None are particularly resource intensive, but need more than a pi.

I recommend looking at what your overall needs are. Will you do any more than serving locally. Do the other features of a nas appeal? For me, running a 24/7 laptop is more inefficient and I don't have a spare, like you. A nas was pretty cheap with other features I use.

It's not that ras pi are not powerful enough, it's more that they don't have built in hardware encoding for h.264 and h.265. I currently use a pi4 and it "works" but I have a fancy encoding script that handles a queue. It's not perfect and spoilers the CPU when processing. And I died a little when I read that the new pi doesn't have it either. So in sort, make sure the video card\chip can encode and decode video and audio.

fwiw, I run emby on my fileserver using an atom C3558 and it can handle h264 and below just fine. h265 needs more cpu though, so. transcoding is transcoding.

You’ll be disappointed with an RPi any time you need to transcode. If you’re only going to be streaming locally and you know that all of your devices support DirectPlay, then great. Go ahead. But if you think you might need transcoding, then you’ll likely want to look elsewhere for something that will actually be able to keep up with transcoding.

Consider looking for something like an HP EliteDesk. You can pick up a refurb G5 model for anywhere from $200-$400. Hell, Amazon probably has refurbs even cheaper than that; They’re commonly used in office buildings for desk workers, then recycled when IT’s 3-year replacement cycle comes around. So there are a lot of used ones on the market, which have only been used for basic things like word processing and excel spreadsheets. The refurb is basically just a matter of adding a new SSD to it (because IT will have ripped the drive out when they recycled it) and giving it some new thermal paste and a blast of air. It’ll be beefy enough to run 2k transcoding decently, while still maintaining a MicroATX size.

Maybe throw an external case fan on it, since it’s passively cooled and tends to run warm? But that’s honestly optional, especially if you’re only using it for Jellyfin and the *arr suite.

It’s hard to make specific recommendations without knowing a budget. You mentioned the RPi so I’m assuming your budget is low. But I just wanted to caution you against the RPi, since you’ll quickly find that it is underpowered for video transcodes.

If you’re dead set on using an SBC for it, maybe something a little more powerful? I’m not super up-to-date on SBC stuff right now, but I know there are several competitors to RPi that offer better specs. The issue with competitors has (at least last time I looked at them) been with software support. The RPi dominates the market, so there is a lot of software written for it. But competitors have historically struggled to get the same kind of support, so you’ll want to do some research to make sure your particular SBC will actually have a decent distro available for Jellyfin.

I'm hosting mine on an old i5-750 (yeah, not 7500...), with an GeForce gt640 and 4GB of ram... Never encountered any problems whatsoever.

I would take a hot take and say, any old pc that you can find will do just fine.

I been using a Intel n100, you can get a box for just over $100 and use a cheap USB 10TB HDD.

I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 (with a lot of other stuff) and it works great. I'm only direct streaming tho, it's too slow for transcode I think.

just grab one of your old laptops

I'm doing it on a ln i3 6th gen SFF PC. It's holding up quite well for many other things as well. A pi could suffice, but maybe for a single user at a time.

GMKtec?

Look for a gmktec barebone at AliExpress you wouldn't find anything better on the net.

I've bought $10 Igel thin client with some quadcore AMD shitcessor. It runs very snappy, even transcodes (that is not snappy), but as I never need to transcode, it works very well for me. I've mounted my TV and Movie & music colections from my NAS with CIFS and it works very well.

Supermicro latest H13 servers are good pieces of hardware. They also can run jellyfin. For optimal longevity, I recommend a Supermicro AS -2025HS-TNR fit with 2 9654, 12 dimms of 64GB DDR5, and 12 20TB HDDs.

So that would be my pick, with the stated requirements.