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!
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The comments aren’t doing a great job of explaining this but Plex can run on virtually any reasonably modern hardware: old laptops, thin clients, an old desktop, scrap parts. If you can get linux running on it, you can run plex for local network usage with one or two users.
Where hardware starts to matter is if you need to expose it to lots of simultaneous users or you need to do lots of transcoding. I do know of some users with giant libraries where the libraries can be a little slow to browse but it can be helped with a cache SSD for the metadata.
At this point the iGPU on intel processors is the easiest way to do transcoding and can handle a lot of streams with hardware transcoding. I used to have a nvidia card in my box and realized the iGPU was actually better anyway. I also think your streams should be direct play as much as possible. It’s much easier and more efficient to have your library on a flexible format to start and just avoid on demand trsnscode.
If you need external access and need a VPN, you need a little extra power - or a separate device.
Now, OP didn’t ask but I’ll give my two cents on Plex vs Jellyfin.
Objectively, Plex is still the easiest to set and forget and is the most feature rich. I used it for something close to 15 years. I finally dropped it when I couldn’t watch live tv anymore because of a known bug they just refused to fix for over a year. That was the last straw for me on top of all the enshittification.
I tried Jellyfin and found it lacking features and it was more difficult to manage securely. That led me to Emby. I’m not sure why it never comes up in these discussions. It’s a nice middle ground. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby from when Emby decided to go closed source to try to figure out a sustainable financial model so they’re very similar but Emby gives you back some of the convenience features from Plex.
But ultimately I think this is a personal preference and none of these are one size fits all. Plex is a reasonable place to start but, in my opinion, Emby is worth a look. Jellyfin is the ultimate choice for open-source, personal control, and privacy that the other two can’t match because of their financial models.
I got a used thinkpad x1 carbon for under 200 a year ago from a used electronics store in my area. It’s running Debian and the YAMS stack, I found it easiest for me to get running as a docker noob
Got an old laptop? I recommend that. Put linux on it.
This. Plex doesnt need a lot of resources, I ran it from a raspberry pi 3 for years without issue.
If you want it to transcode stuff it might need some. I run it on an old laptop that has a 1050m in it.
Can I chime in without sounding anti-Plex? Nothing specifically against it, but they’re kind of going bad. Jellyfin is a lot more private and better to host for data control/privacy.
Don’t get me wrong, Plex of easy to setup, configure, share, etc. with a lot of robust features, but their private equity or venture capitalist money has them selling/sharing data and are cutting out jobs to save money, etc.
JF gives you the freedom Plex once did before its corruption. I’ve been on Plex 12+years and switched about a year ago.
See, I hadn’t even heard that. Is JF on anything like Apple TV (like Plex) or would i have to figure out the streaming part?
It’s pretty much everywhere Plex is. The main issue is that it’s trickier to set up for sharing outside your LAN.
I would never be doing that, so I’m sold on it then. It’s basically just my backup movie/TV hub for my LAN.
Does TailScale make this easier or nah?
Very easy server-wise. But you may neeed to help your family member/friend with the initial set up on the client, if they are not so tech-savy.
From my limited testing of tailscale a while back, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work. Saw no reason to switch from my wireguard setup.
Can confirm it works. I have jf over tailscale.
I use my own domain but could be done using tailscale urls if you dont want to deal with certificates, split horizon dns, etc.
The Jellyfin clients for Apple TV are not very good in my opinion and use case. Thankfully there are a lot more than there used to be 6 months ago. But, at least for me, they are lacking in features. I keep trying to them every so often hoping they have improved so I can finally make thr switch.
On the Apple tv just use infuse. Sure it sucks paying for an app, but it works.
Glad it works for you, but it is missing live tv, which is the biggest thing all the Jellyfin apps either do poorly or don’t do at all. I went through all 19 ish apps I could find a few weeks ago and none of them checked off all my boxes. But I will keep looking and hoping.
I haven’t used Plex in a while, but I presume it would go similarly to my Jellyfin migration this year.
I pulled out a 10 year old laptop from my pile of scrap, installed a light-weight Linux server that can run containers, and I’ve been running LinuxServer.io’s Jellyfin container on it. Updates are pretty easy and I don’t have to worry about cluttering the host box’s packages with dependencies that may or may not conflict with the other things I run in it.
If you have the time to figure out how to run apps in containers, I highly recommend doing so. There’s a lot of documentation for Docker, and Docker Compose files make managing the containers pretty easy.
