Comment on Self-hosted media server to share with 5+ people?
dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
other than hardware (close to anything you got lying around + dirt cheap used 3.5" drives) I don’t see what the expensive part is. granted, if you follow the youtubers with their specialized builds with $400 motherboards and virtualize this and kubernette that, sure, that’s gonna cost you. but if you disable transcoding on the server and store standard 1080p h264/x265 files that practically anything can play, a humble 10+ year old PC will do just fine.
start small - you already have a PC of some sort, run jellyfin server on with a couple of movies and shows and make it work. once it works within your household, look into accessing it from the outside. once that works, add an user or two.
once you make all of that work then you can look at drawing up optimal specs and setting up a separate box and whatnot.
lemmylommy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I am running plex server on a low power i3-7xxx. thanks to the igpu that thing can handle a few 1080p transcodes at once. Even 4K HDR transcoding is possible, though I never get more than one or two of them at the same time. Unless you need it to encode subtitles into the video or you have many simultaneous HDR to SDR conversions going at once any cheap old PC with an intel 7th gen or newer and igpu should do well. Oh, and I don’t think they can handle AV1, but that is still very uncommon.
CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Intel iGPUs work phenomenally for transcoding but a lot of people who share with others keep their 4K files in a separate unshared library and only share 1080p and below since they tend to require transcoding a lot more than everything else.