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Hi I am trying to set up a diy home server for use as photo backup and cloud storage for my family and relatives. I was thinking about using my old PC as server. I have a few HDDs lying around and could do RAID1 backup aswell. Next up, i was going to install TrueNAS on it, and run something like Plex, JellyFin or Emby on it. Now i want to know, what do you guys think of this solution? Which media server would you recommend? Keep in mind that i need it to be simple to use for all ages, and it needs to have an option to upload photos from smartphone directly to my server. But i dont want it syncing the whole camera feed directly. Which platform would you guys choose and how would you build and configure it? Would be better to use some linux distro? Or maybe even windows server? I want to see some recommendations :) Thanks

Hey All, I have been running an Emby Server from my everyday computer for about 8 months now (Plex doesn't do my Anime collection justice) and I decided last month to build a NAS placing all of my video files on it. A week later the video below popped into my recommended. I decided since Black Friday was coming up to use the video as a guide to build my own NAS. Now I know what was recommended was specifically for 4K editing and this is overkill for my current needs, but I just wanted to futureproof this build so I wouldn't need any upgrades two years from now when I may be running VMs for my home or... something. For now though, all this NAS will be doing is running Emby/Plex at home mostly Direct Play to my TV. I did a little research and decided to go with TrueNas because it was free. Doing some more research I decided to go with Unraid because 1. I can add additional drives one at a time as needed and 2. I don't like the idea of striping the drives. In playing one movie title, why would I need five drives to spin up? One will do I thought. Parity will do just fine and if for some reason I do end up losing a drive only the files on that drive is lost. Now, one of the changes I did make was getting a B550 instead of a B450. My plan was to put this in my closet not to be seen. The reason I purchased the B550 was the wireless feature. Why should I run a 50ft cable to my closet? Well, I should have done some more research because apparently Unraid doesn't support wireless connectivity. The question now is should I just install Windows onto it, continue running Emby/Plex as I was and simply Share the drives onto my Network so I can add new files from my current computer? I would have my wireless connectivity and I would continue the same as I was, eventually building Unraid in a year or so. Or: Should I go through with Unraid; run that 50 ft cable, and wait hours on end for my files (40TB+-) to transfer to the new Array? Not sure if I should also be worried about power consumption for an always on Windows PC vs Unraid NAS. Anyway the parts are below. PC: Case: Fractal 7 XL - Storage Layout GPU: None CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 w/ stock cooler PSU: G Skill 850 80 Plus Gold Motherboard: ASUS B550 - WiFi RAM: 32 GB of ECC memory SSD: (2) 500GB HDD: (2) 14 TB Seagate PCI: HBA SATA PCI Card

Ok so lets start this off by saying i have a bunch of old servers laying around my house (im in IT so i tend to gather old equipment). For the last few years i have been using a dell R710. I have been using proxmox to manage this server. specs are below 2x xeon 6 core processors 24GB RAM (i have failing ram slots.. it is suppose to be 64GB) 4x 4TB 7200RPM toshiba enterprise storage drives 1x 500 GB SSD i run OS and some other stuff off of On this machine i run a container for emby, a windows vm that i run my vpn (PIA) and utorrent, sonarr, radarr, etc, and finally I run a windows 10 VM that I work off of (dont want to use my actual gaming pc for work) This has worked pretty good for a few years.. i even use to have 5400rpm wd reds in there (4tb) and upgraded to the 7200rpm enterprise drives.. However, not only am I running out of space, but I am also sharing my libraries with a few family members so i notice some slowness. Also lately i made a whoopsie doodle. lets just say i hadnt linux'd for a while and i was trying to clear out my cache folder for emby and i accidentally wiped all files that were not currently locked on the ENTIRE proxmox environment.. needless to say, my emby still works for reasons that i wont waste time explaining how, however, I cannot access proxmox os, or shares or anything outside of the containers and vms.. so if they shut down or server reboots, its done. So I have been thinking of upgrading anyways so when this happened, I went ahead and purchased an HP Z840 workstation. it has 2x 14-core xeons and 64GB of RAM. I also purchased 3x 10TB 7200RPM enterprise drives, and I have a crucial 525GB SSD laying around. Anyways, the plan is to throw unraid in this system and put the 3 10tb drives in there with one of them being parity and the ssd being cache. So now to my question. I have another R410 server at my house i have been testing unraid on while i wait for my HP to come in.. I installed unraid and installed my dockers, etc.. i seem to have the dockers working and everything, but everytime i reboot my server, ALL of my settings for the dockers go away.. I read up about my appdata being set to write to cache only.. i tried that and its still happening. I swear ive spent days so far trying different combo's and everytime all my data is gone. searching is bringing me to the same articles and I cant figure it out. Anyone have any ideas? or is unraid even the right way to go? Been following LTT for a long time, just decided to go to my forums here since most of my friends are either not tech nerds like me or have experience in other departments and dont ever venture into this realm. Thanks everyone, have a GREAT day!

Hi everyone. So, I'm new to making a server, and I need some input from all of y'all. Here's what I plan on doing with it: I plan on running it as an Emby server (instead of using something like Plex) to host all of my family's home videos I've recorded on there. I also want to run a Minecraft Forge Server with mods on it too. So with those 2 things in mind, I'm hoping I can keep the price relatively cheap. (At least $1,000 USD or less, if possible.) I was thinking about looking for some NAS type hard drives since SSDs are a little bit out of my price range as of now, but I am open to ideas on how any of y'all think I should do this instead to get the best performance possible out of it. (My original idea was to buy a Dell Optiplex from Ebay and upgrade any parts as needed per one of my friend's ideas.) Thank you all in advance!

Hi everybody I'll explain my problem briefly: due to surging power bills here in Europe and the fact my current one is broken I wanna switch my Jellyfin/Emby media server to a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, new RBPis are sold out everywhere and so I'm stuck with an old one I have laying around (a B+ from 2014/2015). It's nice from a reduce/reuse prospective, but that board's SOC is of course old and slow, and won't support any kind of live trans-coding of video content. So i set myself up to convert my entire video library to formats which wouldn't need to be trans-coded by the server but could be played directly by the clients. The clients in question are a WebOS 5 TV (which thanks to LG's amazing OS fragmentation, will probably never get the Jellyfin app and that's why i'm also running Emby), various iOS and Android devices and several PCs (using the apps, I'm not interested in browser streaming). And here are my doubts (I'm kind of new to this all video trans-coding world). I would answer them by live testing the whole thing, but unfortunately my current media server is down for other issues and i would like to be certain of this strategy actually working before ripping out the Raspberry from its current use and setting up this new media server on it. MP4 H264 AAC 8bit seems like the safest bet, every sort of device seems to support it, but it's not as disk-space and bandwidth efficient as H265 and furthermore the latest version of Handbrake doesn't allow to take advantage of Nvidia's GPU NVENC encoder for it (i don't know why, after googling it out it seems that it used to be supported but that's no longer the case) meaning much longer trans-coding times (4 or 5 times as much, with my machine R5 3600 Quadro P4000). These factors are tempting me to go for H265, but while Jellyfin's forum has a table that would suggest that every device I use is compatible with H265, such information is nowhere to be found on Emby's blog/forum; my TV supports H265/HEVC but I came to understand (again not sure if true) that the app itself needs to be compatible with the format, it's not a given of the TV's hardware. Also, I've ended up in a Google rabbit hole of people saying that NVENC is garbage, that it destroys video quality and that shouldn't be used to re-encode stuff, others saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread...I'm kind of confused honestly. The main question then is: can i get away with H265 given the compatibility doubts, and should NVENC be seriously considered (both for H264 and H265)? If you could help me, that would be much appreciated. Thanks everybody.

I am installing Emby (http://emby.media) on my debain server It is asking for ffmpeg and giving me a download link, i downloaded it and it is saying it cant find it ffmpg file path as viewed over ssh from my mac: seadragon@SeaDragon:~/ffmpeg$ ls -la total 173208 drwx------ 3 seadragon seadragon 4096 Oct 17 19:46 . drwxr-xr-x 3 seadragon seadragon 4096 Oct 17 19:14 .. -rwxrwxr-x 1 seadragon seadragon 45064304 Oct 14 21:50 FFmpeg -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 46256112 Oct 14 21:57 ffmpeg-10bit -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 44973872 Oct 14 21:50 FFprobe -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 40266776 Oct 14 21:50 ffserver -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 35147 Oct 14 21:57 GPLv3.txt drwx------ 2 seadragon seadragon 4096 Oct 14 21:53 manpages -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 742472 Oct 14 21:50 qt-faststart -rwxrw-r-- 1 seadragon seadragon 2701 Oct 14 21:57 readme.txt ffmpeg file path as viewed over smb from my mac https://goo.gl/photos/QqsZPEw2cuq4Lfn26 emby web setup: https://goo.gl/photos/HCStVM52gdWwM3oM7 emby web setup error: https://goo.gl/photos/iKZ28iH8FZ3smpty8 any ideas whats wrong? I tried capitalizing the f's like in the web setup and I tried everything lowercase

Hi, Ive decided today after the recent update of plex forcing news on my server to look for a alternative. I've come across Emby and love the user interface on its apps which is close to plex. So what are the pros and cons of Emby ?so far I know the setup is more complex. Cheers.

for my emby server I couldn't figure out how to make my two 1tb hard drives into one volume to use for my media server so I mounted them as /MediaServer/disk1 and /MediaServer/disk2 sinse then I have discovered btrfs but im not sure exactly how to use it I need help combining both the drives to just be /MediaServer/ with the data striped across the two without loosing any of the data on the drives I found a command to convert a drive to btrfs and the debian wiki shows how to add a second drive but im not sure how to do what I need https://askubuntu.com/questions/198000/how-can-i-convert-an-ext4-partition-to-btrfs-or-other-file-systems-without-los

does this look any good for a replacemnt for my core 2 duo server running my website and my zoneminder security system? http://a.co/bDtsgRM i would also want to add emby onto it ( i currently have emby on a second computer but with how much of a performance bump this will be over my current i think i should be able to consolidate

So I have built a Freenas server, the server runs cloud services and emby. I use emby to watch my live tv. I am using the HDhomerun Prime connected to emby so I can watch up to 3 streams of live tv at once from any device. I am only using a cable card costing me $5 a month vs me paying for 3 setup boxes from my provider. The chromecast works amazing and seamlessly with the emby app on my smartphone tablet or computer. Using the chromecast I can put live tv on anywhere in my home with a chromcast. What is in questions is when would I see slow wifi speeds if multiple chromcasts are streaming live tv from the server. The video would be 1080p? How would I be able to check this before investing in more then one chromecast?

So I want to setup a media server for a couple of phones, tablets, chromecasts, remote streaming. I have used plex before and I liked it until I found out that you have to have a Plex Pass or pay-per-app to use the app. This was a deal breaker because I don't want to buy a Plex subscription. I looked at Emby and saw this exact same thing. Now my question is, is there a server software that allowed for free app streaming, remote access, and playing audio through chromecasts?

So I just watched the What's On My Phone video and it made me think, is Plex the best home media server software out there? I personally use Emby and I find it to be the best one I have found. Are there any other that you would recommend to use? Plus this might get noticed a little easier than a comment or twitter message.