Hey everyone, I’m pretty new to this, I’ve only been running Jellyfin on my laptop for media but nothing 24/7. Honestly, it’s not bad and I like it better than paying a thousand different streaming services. I also have some experience with Linux so this seems like a pretty fun hobby I’d say :)
I want to get more into self hosting some other stuff, but I don’t have a very big budget, I want the bare minimum to get things working without too much trouble. Also I’d rather not have a big setup since space is pretty limited where I am. This is what I’d like to host:
- Jellyfin (with *Arr optional)
- PiHole or some other ad blocker/privacy
- Magic Mirror or other way to display weather, public transit schedules etc… (I actually just found out about this on another thread so I’d say its optional too. I’m planning on connecting it to a small display rather than a mirror)
- And whatever else you might recommend :)
As far as data storage goes, I’m not a very “materialistic” person, so I’m sorted out with my backup hard drives and devices that go everywhere with me. This wouldn’t be necessary, but if I have the capacity I’d say why not. I don’t necessarily want to have my network exposed to the public Internet, I don’t want to do networking and having everything run on a local network is more than enough for me.
I know about RaspberryPis but the shortage and inflated prices are not ideal, so I’ve been looking into Libre Computer’s lineup (LE Potato specifically). Mini PCs and old laptops seem like a viable option but is there anything in particular spec-wise I should look for?
Thanks in advance :)
If you go old PC and use it for Jellyfin, you probably want hardware that can do accelerated video transcoding so you probably want to aim for 8th gen or newer Intel CPUs (with integrated graphics), because that gets you 10bit h265 transcoding, which I’d say is probably the bare minimum you should aim for these days.
Granted that’s 5 or 6-year-old hardware, so it’s hardly new, but it took me a bit to figure out why in the world the transcoding performance and quality sucked and what’s supported where and at what gen of hardware is… hilariously unclear.
Oh nice for the heads up, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for transcoding capabilities. I don’t understand transcoding that well yet, so I know what I’ll be reading up on next.