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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Jellyfin is the way. It’s not that complex to set it up either.
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.
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.
I tried to move to Jellyfin…but it wasn’t capable of scanning my library… either too big or too many different video types…but it has never been able to complete.
Quick google search says this is a known issue, so I abandoned it.
How big is your library? Mine is close to 10TB with files of all sizes and types and I don’t have an issue.
Um… Refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it may incriminate me… ;-)
Seriously though, I think when you add movies and TV shows together, close to 70TB? (All with disc backups of course)
The introduction of UHD has caused the libraries to explode in size…
Google gets tons of stuff wrong now it has AI. Did you confirm it was a known issue listed on the Jellyfin support site?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s basically a web server to play media on the front end and a metadata manager and conversion engine on the back.
Pretty well the same as Plex but there’s less reliance on external services, more truly self contained and less subscription. There are client apps for most streaming boxes that I know of.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
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.
Do you have any old/spare hardware you can use?
An old laptop or get hold of a Dell Optiplex with at least 7th gen Intel.
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.
