Hi selfhosted community. First off, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this.
I’m trying to look for a computer / server that can handle Plex streaming reliably (just family members so a few connections).
I’ve looked around and some people say to get a NAS but apparently the transcoding is not good on those. Others have said N100, but I’m not sure exactly which one to get so I’m at a loss.
I would just like something that is great today and a bit future proof in case I want to up my storage. I preferably don’t want to build an entire huge desktop PC but looking for something with a smaller footprint where I can hide it behind the TV or behind a desk if need be.
Thank you so much for reading, and for the help!
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I’d also suggest taking a look at Jellyfin.
As to the hardware, I’ve seen lots of recommendations for refurbished thin clients on eBay. Good value. Myself, I’m using a pc I had built for live streaming, and pivoted into a server. I think it’s got an i7 in it. I recently added some ram to bulk it up to 32g, and while it stared with a 240gb ssd, it’s now got a whole raid array in it.
Welcome to the club! My Plex box is an i7-950. Not a 9600k… It’s whatever I had lying around. It eats more power than it needs to, but it fits a whole lotta hard disk, so I’m good! It also shares it’s library with a little VM on a Dell tiny i5-4570t which runs jellyfin. I prefer jellyfin, the Mrs and the MIL prefer Plex. Don’t stress high end hardware, just make sure you can stuff enough disks in it to hold your library. I bought the tiny used from an auction, and I built the Plex box back in, like, 2008 or something? Anyways, the point is, it’ll probably work fine, go cheaper if you want.
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 NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #552 for this sub, first seen 28th Feb 2024, 01:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’ve got my Plex server running on an Intel NUC 8 with 2 USB 2TB solid state drives serving as local storage for my media.
An HP Elitedesk mini PC would be small enough to tuck away somewhere and have hardware accelerated transcoding support. Jellyfin recently enabled hardware acceleration for the latest Rockchip boards like the Orange Pi 5 so that’s an option too. If you pre-encode your media into a format compatible with everything you want to stream to then it doesn’t matter, just pick any hardware than can get on your network and run Linux.
I am in the same situation as OP and this is the route I’m moving along. I got myself a used 800 G3 SFF based on a comment in a similar thread a few days ago.
It feels like a fine machine that consumes less power, supports upto 64 GB of RAM (I got 2x16 with future upgrades in mind). But the most noticeable thing about it is that it has space for 2x3.5" HDDs that none of the machines this size have, apart from the NVMe disk I put in. I intend to put 2x4 TB disks in it in RAID1 mainly to store family photos and videos. I’m learning docker to set up immich properly- i don’t want to lose anything due to my stupidity in updating things.
I have about a dozen questions regarding the same but I’m scared to put them all in a single post. But I’m trying to follow advice on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY and hoping things will turn out fine. Based on their recommendation, I’ve also obtained a used g4560 processor to replace the existing dual core processor (i think it is 4400 or something like that) it came with. I hope it’ll be sufficient for stremio/torrentio/RD that everyone is so pleased with.
All in all I’m enjoying the journey of setting it up and my only fear is not of losing the data but of curating it to my liking and then losing the customisations in a fuckup.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You don’t actually need a NAS. You can install in an old hardware you have and it will work just fine.
However things may become short in space quickly, cause video needs a lot of storage. So if you want to host many video files, I would recommend at least high capacity HDs. A NAS would be the perfect setting, but not always we can do perfect settings.
What I suggest however, is to be sure that your network settings (router, mainly) support streaming, cause if your router sucks, you’ll not only become frustrated soon with the streaming, but all your connection with internet in general may become degraded.
Also, you can start small, with a small server with internet HD, and then adjust and implement NAS in the future. It’s an easy task.
You may wanna take a look at Jellyfin as well
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