Server for Jellyfin / Plex media streaming?

[Poison4K]

Hey lads, i am wanting to make a Jellyfin / Plex server so i can stream 4k video and music to my devices at home and to access while i'm out-and-about on my phone.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) and i'm wondering if that would be good to use. I like the fact it is compact and low-wattage so i'm not paying a lot in electricity costs were i to keep it running 24/7.

I also have a 4690k i could use, i could try to build a media streaming server out of that but i'm not sure if the electricity cost of leaving it running 24/7 would sky-rocket compared to the Pi 4.

Can i get some advice from those of you who are very satisfied with your NAS media streaming solutions?

I am also open to simply purchasing a NAS from Synology or something if that's a much better idea.

Please & Thank You!

[Donut417]

7 minutes ago, Poison4K said:

Hey lads, i am wanting to make a Jellyfin / Plex server so i can stream 4k video and music to my devices at home and to access while i'm out-and-about on my phone.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) and i'm wondering if that would be good to use. I like the fact it is compact and low-wattage so i'm not paying a lot in electricity costs were i to keep it running 24/7.

I also have a 4690k i could use, i could try to build a media streaming server out of that but i'm not sure if the electricity cost of leaving it running 24/7 would sky-rocket compared to the Pi 4.

Can i get some advice from those of you who are very satisfied with your NAS media streaming solutions?

I am also open to simply purchasing a NAS from Synology or something if that's a much better idea.

Please & Thank You!

With Plex it comes down to are you transcoding or not. Transcoding is what requires SHIT loads of power (depending on resolution of course). It also come down to how many streams at once. A Raspberry Pi would be limited in what it can do. Transcoding can be GPU accelerated as well, BUT you have to pay for Plex pass. GPU wise you can use Intel iGPU's to do this process, any modern day Intel CPU with Quicksync can handle transcoding pretty damn well from what I have read. Nvidia is a great option as well. AMD cards can only do it in Windows and I think its like only the newer AMD cards. 

 

As far as streaming out and about, you need to be careful because if you dont have a lot of upstream then your not going to be able to do 4K. Any time a device doesn't support the resolution or the file format, Plex will transcode it to work on that device. So its advisable that if you have devices that dont do 4K, you have lower resolutions available for those devices. 

[Poison4K]

Just now, Donut417 said:

With Plex it comes down to are you transcoding or not. Transcoding is what requires SHIT loads of power (depending on resolution of course). It also come down to how many streams at once. A Raspberry Pi would be limited in what it can do. Transcoding can be GPU accelerated as well, BUT you have to pay for Plex pass. GPU wise you can use Intel iGPU's to do this process, any modern day Intel CPU with Quicksync can handle transcoding pretty damn well from what I have read. Nvidia is a great option as well. AMD cards can only do it in Windows and I think its like only the newer AMD cards. 

 

As far as streaming out and about, you need to be careful because if you dont have a lot of upstream then your not going to be able to do 4K. Any time a device doesn't support the resolution or the file format, Plex will transcode it to work on that device. So its advisable that if you have devices that dont do 4K, you have lower resolutions available for those devices. 

I definitely plan to transcode, i plan to store 4K content so that's a must. I know i put Plex in the title but really i'm going with Jellyfin. I want to get involved in automation stuff like Sonarr and Radarr, stuff like that.

As far as Quicksync, the 4690k is Haswell and it looks like it doesn't support H.265, idk how important that is, honestly.
Worried about adding a GPU, was hoping to go off of the iGPU to keep energy costs low.
I'd be streaming to maybe 2 devices at a time, max.

What do you feel would be my best options for what i want to do?
It sounds like maybe the Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) option is out; should i use my 4690k and build something myself, buy a newer CPU to build new, or buy something on the market?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Poison4K said:

I definitely plan to transcode, i plan to store 4K content so that's a must. I know i put Plex in the title but really i'm going with Jellyfin. I want to get involved in automation stuff like Sonarr and Radarr, stuff like that.

As far as Quicksync, the 4690k is Haswell and it looks like it doesn't support H.265, idk how important that is, honestly.
Worried about adding a GPU, was hoping to go off of the iGPU to keep energy costs low.
I'd be streaming to maybe 2 devices at a time, max.

What do you feel would be my best options for what i want to do?
It sounds like maybe the Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) option is out; should i use my 4690k and build something myself, buy a newer CPU to build new, or buy something on the market?

If your gonna transcode, you need way more than a pi

 

If you don't have hardware h265 on the gpu, then it won't really be usedfull here.

 

A gpu won't add much more power, they idle at like 10-15w, and thats what it will be doing most of the time, even under moderate load transcoding, its probably sub 100w still

 

Id test your 4690k and see how it works, and add a gpu if needed.

[Poison4K]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If your gonna transcode, you need way more than a pi

 

If you don't have hardware h265 on the gpu, then it won't really be usedfull here.

 

A gpu won't add much more power, they idle at like 10-15w, and thats what it will be doing most of the time, even under moderate load transcoding, its probably sub 100w still

 

Id test your 4690k and see how it works, and add a gpu if needed.

What kind of GPU should i get?

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, Poison4K said:

What do you feel would be my best options for what i want to do?

Im not familiar with Jellyfin. I actually use Plex and have Plex pass, so I know more of what Plex can do. I do know according to what I have read, Transcoding 4K content requires a lot of power. Its probably a good idea to avoid transcoding if possible. Like I said, have a 4K file and maybe have one at 1080p for devices that dont support 4K. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Poison4K said:

What kind of GPU should i get?

Something like a 1650 super would be a decend bet. You cn get a bit older if you wnt to savae some money, but the 1650 super is the cheapest with the high quality turing encoder.

[Poison4K]

I asked earlier if my 4690k would be fine for just a small Plex media streaming server that'd at max have 2 streams at once. I was told by someone on a Discord server to not worry about Quicksync, H.264/H.265 for transcoding 4K content to something like my phone and just "brute force" it.

Won't it be very slow? Would the quality be bad?
I'm not sure what they meant.

[Poison4K]

Idk how big a factor my upload speed is but just adding for reference my upload is ~40 Mbps

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, Poison4K said:

I asked earlier if my 4690k would be fine for just a small Plex media streaming server that'd at max have 2 streams at once. I was told by someone on a Discord server to not worry about Quicksync, H.264/H.265 for transcoding 4K content to something like my phone and just "brute force" it.

Won't it be very slow? Would the quality be bad?
I'm not sure what they meant.

There is two basic types of transcoding. Software vs Hardware. Software is done by the CPU. While hardware transcoding is a GPU task. I can tell you that I transcode on Plex via my CPU (i5 3570K), doing up to two 1080i streams is not an issue. I cant speak for 4K content. 

[smokeweedeveryday]

raspberry pi will defo not be enough

do you have a spare laptop or PC somewhere you could use?

if you want to pay for 'plex pass' to enable hw acceleration, the newer intel cpus with 'intel UHD graphics' can handle 4k well.

but yeah, you'll need at least a i3 or something to transcode 4k lol

if needed, you can get a cheap i5 system on ebay, look up dell optiplexes, the sandybridge/ivybridge i5s are cheap right now. the i7s are quite a bit more expensive even though they're old, so the i5s are generally better value unless you get lucky. i got lucky a few years ago and got a i7 3770 for super cheap, and using it in my server rn

[Kharenis]

Lots of misinformation in this thread so let's clear things up a bit;

 

Transcoding [Turning file of format and quality A to format and quality B]

There are 2 ways to transcode stuff, either via software (brute force that is very taxing on the CPU) or hardware (using optimised hardware built into modern GPUs - this includes the iGPU on Intel CPUs)

 

Software transcoding

The performance you can expect from this is typically dictated by CPU "performance" and the number of simultaneous transcodes/quality of those transcodes tends to scale with the paasmark for the given CPU. For 4k transcodes, I think you'd be out of luck with your 4690k OP, you could probably get 1, but it'll peg your CPU and may result in buffering.

 

Hardware transcoding

Typically done on an Nvidia GPU with NVENC or Intel iGPU with Quick sync (NVENC and Quick Sync are the names Nvidia and Intel give to their hardware transcoding modules).

Transcoding performance and quality for Intel iGPUs scales with the iGPU version (UHD 630 is lightyears ahead of the previous versions and can easily handle several 4k transcodes simultaneously)

For Nvidia, the go-to seems to be either a P2000 or GTX 1060 (though this will need "modified" drives for more than 2 simultaneous transcodes I believe).

 

Upload Speed

If you want your content to be viewed outside of your local network, it will indeed need to be transcoded from 4k to 1080p. With 40Mbps you could probably push 1 low-mid quality 4k stream, but it'll saturate your upload. You could manage several 1080p streams though.

 

Price per peformance wise (and power), you're probably better off buying an i3-10100 & supporting mobo/RAM if you want 2+ simultaneous 4k transcodes.

 

And as others have noted, the pi is unfortunately a few orders of magnitude too low on processing oomph to get you anywhere.