Background:
Over Covid, I got really into high quality music and purchased the best headphones I could afford (ATH-MX50) and listened frequently. Once I discovered Jellyfin, a whole new world opened up to me and I began to self-host movies as well as my FLAC library.
Present: My parents want to cut the cord and I would like to help them by setting up a server for them. I’m techy and can handle some troubleshooting.
Requirements:
- I’d like for it to have at least 5 profiles, no more than 2 concurrent streams
- I’d like to add things to a “queue” from my phone and manage my downloads like that
- 4k media, perhaps transcodes to 1080p, but the local media is 100% 4k
- Be able to SSH (or alternative) for remote debugging
Questions: What hardware should I buy? I’ve built PCs, so mostly, what cpu and how much storage should I go for? I can afford quite a bit, so I’d like to buy the right tool for the job once with upgrades to storage as needed. I know Jellyfin handles profiles, does Jellyseer handle the ability to automate downloads? Is this something the .arr stack can do?
Thank you for all your help, any advice is VERY appreciated. I just want to help my parents cut the cord
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If you need 4k you’re going to need a shit ton of storage. If you go for the good quality profile 4ks you’re looking at 50GB easily per file.
Sonarr and Radarr can fetch downloads, yes. You’ll need to configure your indexers and then you’ll need to set up your download clients. I use a torrent server and sabnzbd.
You’ll need a graphics card that can handle transcoding 4k I’m not sure which is best. Ram and CPU won’t be the biggest concerns for you.
Thanks, we tend to watch things once then not again, I figure 12TB across 4 drives should hold that pretty well? I just want a buffer of like, 5 episodes per show. Once watched, auto-delete. This should be enough storage no?
If that’s the case, then just set up a pipeline to pre-transcode your 4k content to 1080p, so your server doesn’t have to handle that on the fly.
Sonarr and radarr can download files, but you cant set it to not download more than 5 episodes unless you do it manually. There is an arr app that auto deletes files older than X days (I forgot the name), but you also have to delete torrent files to get more space (this part can be done by setting up qbittorrent to auto delete after some time, but then you might have issues with your trackers unless you are using public or usenet).
Jellyseer is just amazing GUI that can be used instead of loging in to radarr and sonarr, allowing you to press just one button to request media.
I think arr stack is amazing for downloading (automated or manual), but you might need extra thinkering to not fill up your storage. 12 TB is more than enough for me, but I only use 1080p.
My 12 TB is filling up around 1TB a month, so I will just free up 5-6 TB manually every 6 months. Well, thats the plan at least, time will tell
Oppenheimer even had 80 gigs, if I am not mistaken.
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956
They are all about low cost high performance builds.
Quicksync from Intel with an igpu is a god send . I’m running an i3 in my Plex server and it’s a hoss.
Good luck op
Thank you, do you run this with overseer?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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A 7th gen i5-7500 is enough to handle hardware transcoding, though generally you want to be downloading media that can be direct played rather than needing transcoding
Like it was already suggested, everything since intel 7th gen with quick sync should do the job for transcoding 4k hdr 10 bit releases, even the low tier i3 ones. You will also not need much ram for transcoding 8 should be fine, with a larger raid array go for 16 or above. When you watch stuff just once anyway, honestly you will not need much, a couple of TB should be more than enough. Not aware of any service that does automatic downloads based on a queue.
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I’d suggest configuring it for AV1 and use a RDNA 3 GPU.
Plenty of players still don’t support AV1, though with a modern gpu you can brute force transcoding it on the fly.
I have a jellyfin test server running an an intel n95 and it can easily handle a couple of 4k AV1 to H265 transcoded streams on it’s own with decent image quality, but it struggles with 3 if the bitrates are too high. still, it’s more complexity than is needed considering AV1 only saves a small amount of space over a good H265 encode which are ubiquitous on the net.
Hardware decode for AV1 is only available on fairly recent devices. Software decoding is not likely to work for high quality 4K video.
the Arr apps will automate downloads but you can go into their ui’s manually for overriding things when needed (like replacing a bad copy of a TV show for example), jellyseer/overseer handles requesting and adding new shows/movies to be monitored from a simple webapp that you would host on the server and give them a shortcut to on their devices homepage.
I’d go with a 12th gen or newer intel cpu, something small and entry level is more than enough like a 12100 or 12400, we just want the igpu to handle the occasional transcode, 16gb of ram, a cache SSD or two in a mirror, and a decent stack of HDDs of your choice, the OS can be anything you want but I suggest going with something NAS focused like unraid, openmediavault or truenas (jellyfin is not officially supported on truenas but it does work). if it’s a new build from scratch for long term archival of high quality media i’d start with at least 6 HDDs, with one for parity, if you can budget for 20tb drives for example that gives you a spacious 100tb of useable space with the ability for any one disk to fail without any data loss. you can then build that into a normal ATX PC case.
You can use windows or any flavour of linux but you will be doing more work to make them work properly, where the above solutions are more plug and play.
I would make sure their hardware is capable of playing as many file formats and codecs directly as possible though, when you get into hosting 4K media, particularly for full fat UHD Bluray rips, you will find apps built into TVs or lower end streaming boxes just cant do it and the server has to chug through transcoding on the fly, the igpu can do it just fine, but you should try to avoid it for maximum performance and image quality, so perhaps budget for an nvidia shield or something.
