Hello there, I would like to upgrade my setup from a Raspberry PI 5 to something more capable of running Jellyfin properly. I also plan to host stuff like Nextcloud and some other small services.
The problem is I don’t know anything about choosing hardware. I’ve tried reading online about this stuff and come across many recommendations to buy an NUC, not knowing I would have to purchase every component individually.
I would like your comments on the setup I currently have:
- NUC Type: ASUS NUC 14 Pro Kit (RNUC14RVKI300000I)
- Operating System - Still haven’t decided yet, probably something easy like Ubuntu server
- CPU - Intel® Core™ 3 100U Processor
- Chipset - Integrated
- Graphics - Integrated - Intel® Graphics (C3)
- Memory - Adata 8GB DDR5 4800MHz CL40 SO-DIMM
- Storage - Western Digital Green SN350 1TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe WDS100T3G0C
- LAN - Intel®, 2.5G LAN
Edit 1
Some clarifications: I still haven’t bought anything, this is just what I am currently planning to buy.
I don’t live in the US, and none of my local shops have a pre-built NUC available to purchase.
I will probably upgrade the RAM to a “Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR5 5200MHz CL44” after reading some comments.
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I’m specifically looking into this at the moment as I have been gifted a pi 5.
Most websites say avoid trying to host jellyfin on a pi 5 (codec and hardware issues are frequently noted). Do you have experience that shows these are non-issues?
I have to agree with such websites; every time I try to encode a movie in Jellyfin on my Pi 5, every service I host there freezes for a few moments.
Thanks for the response! Is it limited to encoding services then, so if I’m only dealing with streaming common media file types (e.g. MKV, MP4) is it still a problem? I’m not dealing with a ridiculous amount of media, so I could outsource the encoding process alone if needed…
All my media is MKV and it still does that, that’s one of the main reasons why I want to upgrade
Do you really need it? Have you tried disabling transcoding? Sometimes clients would be able to direct stream but for some reason it still transcodes.
I tried disabling encoding which work for some clients, but for clients that don’t support direct stream like the web interface or the official app that isn’t enough.
Any low power device is going to struggle with video playback unless you’re doing direct streaming. The exception being the new Intel N line of processors that have capable enough GPUs to do the transcoding. If all you’re after is decent transcoding performance for H264/H265 video, anything newer than Intel’s 7-8th gen CPUs will do the job. $100-$200 used optiplexes and thinkcentres can easily handle this type of workload.
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding
Jellyfin supports HW transcoding on Rockchip too, but the issue with the Pi5 specifically is that it doesn’t have a hardware media decoder so it’s actually worse than the Pi4 if you can get HW transcoding running on it.