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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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)