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 circlejerk of “Plex bad get JellyFin” always happens here.
JellyFin doesn’t have as many features and if you want to access your library away from home safely it is more complicated to setup.
I love PlexAmp. It has really reintroduced me to so much of my library I forgot I had.
Depending where you live you can find reasonably priced workstations on https://www.govdeals.com/ that can handle being nothing but a media server.
Fine I will jump in: I am not sure trusting Plex to get access to your home environment is any safer. They have had security issues lately.
But either way, lock down what plex or jellyfin can do in the container is the best way to start.
Plex is easier to just blindly let a corporation (that isnt doing too well) authorize all your users and let them in the open port. I will give you that.
Jellyfin may have less features? I have no idea. I have had both for a very long time, and always go to Jellyfin first. It is snappier, I like the layout better, and it gets the job done.
In terms of features, Jellyfin has watch together. Plex just took that ability away. They also seem determined to make their interface suck.
As far as plexamp goes, I still vastly prefer Clementine on the desktop, but on a mobile device it works ok. I don’t like the way it shows my albums, I don’t like the way it makes finding anything a lot more difficult. But it does let you set a radio station and does a good job of mixing up what you have.
Clementine
Whoa, has Clementine picked up again? I’ve long ago switched to Strawberry and then to Fooyin.
It never really went away. Just slowed down. Latest release was yesterday!
Strawberry is STILL missing too many features that Clementine has.
Never tried Fooyin. I will give it a try.
Edit: I am confused by why such a feature rich applications defaults make me have change to radio, or visualization, or mood bar. I bet I can set all those things, but why isnt there a give my the whole view at once choice? I assume there are shared layouts somewhere to import?
The circlejerk of “Plex bad get JellyFin” always happens here.
Yeah, it’s a sad debate since Kodi is far better than either.
I would bet you also use arch.
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.
As someone who’s used all three (moved from Plex -> Emby -> Jellyfin):
Plex’s killer feature is the relay and the fact it’s completely transparent for users. You log in with a Plex client (whatever device, whatever location in the world) and it will sort out a connection to the Plex server. Complete no-brainer.
Jellyfin has been killing it lately, the last 3 versions (10, 11, 12) were all amazing leaps forward. The devs have been really hitting their stride and are addressing fundamental design issues and making Jellyfin better from the ground up. If you want complete independence, openness and control, excellent performance, this is it.
Emby for me sits somewhere in-between and it’s not necessarily the better off for it. Feels like a compromise or the worst of both worlds. It has touches of Plex’s enshittification streak, it hasn’t addressed any of the core problems like Jellyfin has.
Both Emby and Plex have issues navigating VPNs and complex/unusual network setups because their plug’n’play approach relies too heavily on autodetection. Plex has the relay to fall back on (provided you pay for it) but Emby doesn’t.
Both Emby and Plex will move features around and really, really want you to keep paying so it’s anybody’s guess what you’ll be paying for from month to month. Lifetime passes were (can I say it?) a tremendously STUPID idea and now that ship has sailed anyway.
IMHO, one of these days someone will come up with a way for Jellyfin to provide free, transparent, aecure client+server pairing behind NAT and that will be a huge blow to both Plex and Emby.
I cannot vouch for this because I literally just found it two posts down after reading this one, but the developer of the JellyBox music player has a relay plugin for Jellyfin. It seems to specifically exist for the music player, but that’s still useful for some people: https://github.com/JellyBoxPlayer/jellyfin-relay
+1 for dropping plex for jellyfin.
I nuked plex when they started requiring an internet connection to log in- meaning plex was phoning-home even though I had not exposed the service to the internet in any way. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need an evil corporation knowing my catalog of linux distros.
- all of the plex premium options can be replicated for free, so fuckem.
My go-to for “server” hardware:
- Old office desktop: Dell Optiplex SFF, HP Elitedesk SFF, Lenovo Thinkcentre SFF
- CPU: 7th, 8th, or 9th gen Intel i7, preferably something with vPro (really neat OOB management - keep it local)
- RAM: At least 8GB
- OS drive: 256GB SSD at the minimum
- OS: Debian
- Media storage: Something large enough to store your media. 3.5" HDDs are great for this, but SSDs are better if you can get your hands on a large one.
I also have a NAS based out of an old HP Proliant ML110 tower server case from 2004, outfitted with some modern-ish parts. I like it quite a lot. Very server-like, it does the thing.
So many different opinions, so I might as well weigh in.
I’m a classic story of starting with a 1TB external HDD to now my 160TB server. I just kept going and didn’t know when to stop. It’s very affordable to make sure your server is extensible. Start with a decent case with lots of HDD bays. A Fractal R6 is excellent. A modern Intel CPU does great transcoding for x265 and AV1. No GPU required. Then you just need 8-16GB RAM (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Maybe 256GB SSD (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Get one HDD right now. Whatever has a good price/TB. They’re also expensive right now.
The more important question is the OS. I actually prefer Windows. It’s free (if you look on Google how to activate it for free). If you get more than one HDD you should consider DrivePool to pool your drives. Works great and cheap one time cost. If it’s data you can just download again you don’t need to worry about backup. RAID is a good intermediary step, and for that SnapRAID works really well. You’ll need one HDD for parity, and a good rule of thumb is no more than 5-6 HDDs per parity. RAID means that if a disk dies, you can restore the data. Much cheaper than cloud storage.
If your wanting to get into it as cheap as possible, here’s how I’d do it, in stages
Use an old desktop. Install some Linux based is. I really like truenas but there’s heaps of options. Proxmox has been mentioned too
Install Plex, but I encourage you to install jellyfin as well and point it at the same library. Just try it out and see how you like it.
Think about how important your media library is and if you want some redundancy but honestly most media is easily replaceable
Going with a cheap used system, and then adding an Intel a310 is a good start. For getting drives, look into getting some external Seagate drives, popping them open, and using them internally. Just a couple ideas 😊
It really depends on what you need.
Plex relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play thing, otherwise the server needs to transcode it into something that is playable.
Which means that when you curate your library in a way that is completely compatible with your clients, you can run a Plex server on a raspberry pi. If you don’t, and you need transcoding then you also need the hardware to do so.
This also depends on what needs to be transcoding, a 4K video will require a lot more performance than a 1080p Transcode.
Then, you need to distinguish between the different types of transcoding, when you have a Plex Pass, you can use a GPU for the transcoding, otherwise your CPU needs to do that.
In the last 1-1.5 years, the beelink mini pc with the N100 CPU was really popular because it was small, fairly cheap and had a iGPU in it that could even handle a couple 4K transcodes.
So, the first thing I would do is check what your requirements are. Do you have Plex Pass to be able to utilise hardware transcoding? Maybe also look in other players like Plezy for getting better compatibility than the official Plex app.
Personally I would do this
Find an old laptop, desktop, any computer
Put proxmox on it. It’s free and lightweight
Create a Plex LXC. Also free and lightweight. There are community scripts to do this.
You should get pretty good performance on Plex, you can manage the computer through a web browser and it only costs you whatever the cost of finding some hardware to put it on is
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
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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
Kodi. So much better than Plex or Jellyfin. Not even in the same category. It just takes more work to setup and customize because it’s so much more powerful. I recommend compiling from source, b/c repos can be old and flatpak is bloated.
RasPi and external storage.
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.
There was nothing in the question about jellyfin.
I’m on the jellyfin side, but you people have to chill, this is becoming Ford vs Chevy in here.
It’s not so much a question of one vs another. It was asked the most cost effective way to accomplish such.
Last I knew Plex required an ongoing subscription for some aspects that Jelly has for free, so that consideration is part of cost effectiveness.
Personally I have Emby simply out of inertia since I bought a lifetime licence before there was a Jellyfin spun off, but didn’t propose that because it would be an unneeded cost.
Removed by mod
Considering they’re asking for cost effective ways, and Jellyfin has notoriously poor resource management especially in the memory department, no.
Might have to spin up a JF instance to check, right now I’m using Emby that JF was forked from some while ago and don’t see anything horrid. About 1GB memory for one that’s been up and running for a good while.
1GB is egregious for what amounts to a file server that can spawn ffmpeg. Plex uses like 10x less. Last time I tried Jellyfin it ate 9GB and nuked my NAS out of existence, purely because it tried to scan my fairly modest library.
C# on .NET is pretty horrible on resources and efficiency for stuff like this - this also sometimes happens to a lot of the more established *arr software
Here’s Plex currently generating some audio loudness data on an entire season in the background. In a container (it’d be even leaner if it ran bare metal). I’ve never seen it even reach 500MB under the worst circumstances imaginable.
Well if you don’t have 1GB in your server and want to pay for a lifetime pass instead I guess go nuts? It’s odd that people seem to get so upset over not paying a subscription in a self hosting comm. Functionally if you don’t mind a less polished interface you could just do something like stream via VLC from a NAS too.
Because I want Jellyfin to do better and people to be aware of its shortcomings so they either come and contribute to it to fix it, or at least so they can make informed choices before circlejerking around it. Alternatives are good. Critique is good. Indeed VLC and Kodi and straight up playing MKV files through a file explorer are also valid options. So is Jellyfin but with the damn caveats I pointed out and got downvoted for many times (cause Plex bad duhhh)
I have a lifetime Plex pass from ages ago when it was way less expensive. If I didn’t I’d rather figure out a way to pirate or crack it - because its clients don’t notoriously suck on every platform like JF’s and it doesn’t use several gigs of RAM when scanning a library. I personally don’t give two shits about the company or the people in it. I’m a pirate, I want the nice enough experience, not a quarterly fight with self provisioned or ACME’s SSL certs and 4 competing clients or a fucking tunnel VPN to let my mom stream Love Island.
When 400 people tell you to “just go use Jellyfin” and then it actually sucks ass because you don’t have 32GB of RAM on your fucking SATA box, it’s just annoying, but when you get shat on for pointing out why exactly it sucks so people don’t step on the same rake, that’s actually just rude. When they actively fail to mention any shortcomings that’s just shilling. All I’m saying is moderate expectations and consider the practical shortcomings of what is suggested, just like you do the egregious bullshit Plex is pulling with pricing, but like, also to everything else 🙄
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.
