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!

  • ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.comEnglish
    4816·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • German The Jackal@pawb.socialEnglish
      32·
      1 day ago

      Considering they’re asking for cost effective ways, and Jellyfin has notoriously poor resource management especially in the memory department, no.

      • ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.comEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        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.

        image

        • German The Jackal@pawb.socialEnglish
          2·
          11 hours ago

          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.

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      204·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.comEnglish
        134·
        3 days ago

        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.