I am looking to basically just transition to a small time, forever on, server to support my growing Plex footprint. I don’t need anything top of the line, and I’ve already crimped my lines to the room.
What’s the most cost effective way to go about this? Figured i would come to the pros.
Thanks!
Avoiding Plex for something like Jellyfin is a start.
Past that, it doesn’t take a lot to run such a service unless it needs transcoding which is where it gets dicey for realtime streaming.
If you have a standard expected output you might get away with bulk stranscoding ahead of time and then run things on some little nuc or an old laptop.
There was nothing in the question about jellyfin.
I’m on the jellyfin side, but you people have to chill, this is becoming Ford vs Chevy in here.
It’s not so much a question of one vs another. It was asked the most cost effective way to accomplish such.
Last I knew Plex required an ongoing subscription for some aspects that Jelly has for free, so that consideration is part of cost effectiveness.
Personally I have Emby simply out of inertia since I bought a lifetime licence before there was a Jellyfin spun off, but didn’t propose that because it would be an unneeded cost.
Removed by mod
Considering they’re asking for cost effective ways, and Jellyfin has notoriously poor resource management especially in the memory department, no.
Might have to spin up a JF instance to check, right now I’m using Emby that JF was forked from some while ago and don’t see anything horrid. About 1GB memory for one that’s been up and running for a good while.
1GB is egregious for what amounts to a file server that can spawn ffmpeg. Plex uses like 10x less. Last time I tried Jellyfin it ate 9GB and nuked my NAS out of existence, purely because it tried to scan my fairly modest library.
C# on .NET is pretty horrible on resources and efficiency for stuff like this - this also sometimes happens to a lot of the more established *arr software
Here’s Plex currently generating some audio loudness data on an entire season in the background. In a container (it’d be even leaner if it ran bare metal). I’ve never seen it even reach 500MB under the worst circumstances imaginable.
Well if you don’t have 1GB in your server and want to pay for a lifetime pass instead I guess go nuts? It’s odd that people seem to get so upset over not paying a subscription in a self hosting comm. Functionally if you don’t mind a less polished interface you could just do something like stream via VLC from a NAS too.
Because I want Jellyfin to do better and people to be aware of its shortcomings so they either come and contribute to it to fix it, or at least so they can make informed choices before circlejerking around it. Alternatives are good. Critique is good. Indeed VLC and Kodi and straight up playing MKV files through a file explorer are also valid options. So is Jellyfin but with the damn caveats I pointed out and got downvoted for many times (cause Plex bad duhhh)
I have a lifetime Plex pass from ages ago when it was way less expensive. If I didn’t I’d rather figure out a way to pirate or crack it - because its clients don’t notoriously suck on every platform like JF’s and it doesn’t use several gigs of RAM when scanning a library. I personally don’t give two shits about the company or the people in it. I’m a pirate, I want the nice enough experience, not a quarterly fight with self provisioned or ACME’s SSL certs and 4 competing clients or a fucking tunnel VPN to let my mom stream Love Island.
When 400 people tell you to “just go use Jellyfin” and then it actually sucks ass because you don’t have 32GB of RAM on your fucking SATA box, it’s just annoying, but when you get shat on for pointing out why exactly it sucks so people don’t step on the same rake, that’s actually just rude. When they actively fail to mention any shortcomings that’s just shilling. All I’m saying is moderate expectations and consider the practical shortcomings of what is suggested, just like you do the egregious bullshit Plex is pulling with pricing, but like, also to everything else 🙄