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I was thinking of running a private Jellyfin server in my homelab. (or on a vps)
One of my friends on Discord said it was comfy after setting up Jellyfin. Does anyone here use it? Never used Emby before. I did try Plex on my PC and logging in sucks ass. I already have AdGuard Home installed on my server and VPS.
My current setup is:
ZimaBlade 7700
OS: Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS x86_64
CPU: Intel Celeron N3450 (4) @ 2.200GHz
iGPU: Intel HD Graphics 500
Memory: 4664MiB / 15836MiB (16GB DDR3L ram)
Storage: Integrated 32 GB eMMC (running the OS) / Patriot P210 128GB (for docker) / HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA 6Gb 256MB 3.5" Enterprise HDD (for nextcloud and backups)
I’m running a few Docker containers and exposed my Nextcloud server via WireGuard to my BuyVM LV VPS (running Nginx as a reverse proxy). Is it better to run Jellyfin through Docker? My server might lag with multiple users since the iGPU can’t handle transcoding and the HDD might be slow. I have an Nvidia Tesla P4 from my R810 server running Proxmox VMs (Windows/Ubuntu, Stable Diffusion). Been watching Hardware Haven and Techno Tim about small homelabs and mini PCs as servers. Thinking of a Minisforum MS-01 ($519 USD for i9-12900H barebones) but the price feels overkill. Is a cheap Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro on eBay better? Dad pays for Netflix, and the price keeps going up—used to be cheaper, now $25/mo.
Thanks,
Fubuki
Comments
Jellyfin
ye, it's better in-term of upgrading between version, but it might gotta be a bit tricky to get GPU working in docker container tho
EDIT: speaking from mini pc user(Intel NUC) gotta say iGPU is more than enough for general encoding tho but this is only for 1 user, so experience might be different on yours
I have used plex, jellyfin and emby.
Out of all these, I didn't like jellyfin. It was very slow in my server even without any background task...
I have opted to emby now. Running smooth.
Jellyfin is good. Simple and efficient.
my experience is, if there are only 1 to 2 users, any decent mini pc would do the job nicely.
What is your specs?
I can run jellyfin under docker. I have a few docker containers running idle atm. (portainer, gitea, peertube, homepage, AmneziaWG (Since i don't trust corpo networks), Myspeed and a few more but it's not active atm). I'm mostly going to share this with friends and my parents and brothers but it's mostly going to be myself atm.
huh, weird. Editing the post broke the poll and got rid of it
Been running Jellyfin with Docker for ~3 years now, ~3200 movies and ~500 shows, ~15 users.
Key to efficiency is how the content is encoded, for compatibility encode everything as libx264/aac, which allows disabling video transcoding, while audio transcoding is very light for devices which don't support it.
Also tune trickplay to use 1 thread, it doesn't need to be fast. Library import scanning can also be tuned to 1 or 2 threads.
I am in a discord that charges $5/month for access to his plex server.
Owner has just recently reached 50k movies/tv shows.
80 active users that use his plex server
I've never used jellyfin, but I imagine the resources are about the same?
Hello,
I am long term user of Jellyfin (HomeLab).
I have similar setup, my reverse proxy (NPM) runs locally on prem at my home lab, where as I use a VPS with OpenVPN tunnel to forward the 80/443 traffic into my home lab
Jellyfin runs smoothly under docker or native deployment and HDD is suitable for up to 1080p.
GPU doesn't come into effect with native streaming but only when your client (playing device) isn't compatible with the encoding codec, then server side transcoding happens.
Try to find or encode your content into H.264 as almost every player (client side) is compatible with this for direct streaming. Direct streaming has no SoC load, just HDD reads and network traffic.
4K high bit rate content hangs when you seek the play head. Bit rates are just too high for HDD I/O speeds. One can stream 4K out of HDD but don't touch the play head (timeline of the player for back or forward)
I am using HP Z230 as my home server running everything.
Core i7 4790 / 2GB GDDR5 Nvidia 730 with HDD as data storage
H264 transcoding is done via GPU and anything else is via CPU in Jellyfin at my setup and my setup is fine for 3/4 device of simultaneous streams
Suggestion..
Stick to Jellyfin given players over 3rd party options. They have app for almost every platform and works just fine.
Thanks.
I have been testing jellyfin docker for a while on my zimablade and installing plugins and themes are a breeze. I'm surprised on how it can recognize shows on an instant. I kinda like it but the issue i have atm is themes and i can't figure out how to apply a custom css theme
@import url('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/stpnwf/ZestyTheme@latest/colorschemes/blue.css');in the css theme box. I'm not sure what im doing wrong. other then that. (nvm, found the issue) It's fast. I can just upload anime onto my nextcloud server and jellyfin can recognize it2v cpu E5 2690, 2GB ram, 20 gb SSD, 4TB HDD
I can mostly say that with under docker it's mostly idle around 10% cpu usage and sometimes spikes up to 20-60% of usage.
I heard about people paying access for plex but never paid for one before. that's cool that he has a huge collection of movies and anime
I feel like you should do it locally.
No Worry about DMCA,
easier to troubleshoot,
likely less network latency issue, more network bandwith(if within same LAN)
No need to transfer content out to someone elses server(if your upload speed is slow or ISP limit traffic)
Thats what I am planning to do anyway.
I bet you didn't read the system requirements.
Do you know how many users he has approx.?
What's the system requirement for playing (not transcoding) videos?
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-selection/
Jellyfin is great, I love it. Straight mpv is still best but jellyfin gives a lot of comfort. Emby is gay and plex is payed and not fully open source.
That's spec for transcoding. I do not transcode in my jellyfin server.
Scenario: One client, no transcode.... Jellyfin is slow (cpu usage around 20%). Take ages to play a video.
Same client, same server but now it is emby. Runs smooth.
Considering jellyfin is a fork of emby itself, that's I found surprising.
If you could let me know where to look at for possible issues, it'll be helpful.
Used to run it on 2 cores of a J4125 without GPU, works totally fine as long as you don't need to transcode anything... it barely uses any CPU usage since it just streams a video over the internet.
Keep in mind, as far as I'm aware, only the desktop client can direct play most (all?) content, a TV, mobile device, or the website will transcode. (based on my content at least, I've never had a tv/mobile device/site direct play)
I use to run jellyfin/emby , for some reason HDR video never worked properly.
Switched to Plex, working great for 4k/HDR content. Running Plex server locally.
run it on your phone. those are the most efficient decoders
I already have jellyfin docker setup and all I had to do was to point my anime folder to my HDD like
/hanekawa/nextcloud/data/senko/Videos/Animeand then just chmod 777 on the anime folder. That just works for me and I could just upload files directly on my nextcloud server. The other thing I was planning to do is like what I have with nextcloud since I already have a tunnel between my server and BuyVM Las Vegas VPS I could just config nginx to add a custom reverse proxy to jellyfin.domain.tld or jf.domain.tld although I have my vps capped at 25Mbps up and down and my ISP (Xfinity) capps my upload to 20Mbps and not 100Mbps (that contract was a lie) and yeah. I don't know if I could use jellyfin behind cloudflare since I checked some post on cloudflare forums and most people there said it's not allowed since non-HTML files since something about breaking TOS. I think I should be fine with just exposing my BuyVM server where I also have Adguard home installed on both my home server and vps (for DoT/DoH) and yeah. Since everything is Ipv4 only I should be fine since between my home and my vps is around a ~40ms ping. Although I could have extra vps in SJC or LA but I'm lazy. Las Vegas is comfyTLDR: I'm already hosting my jellyfin docker server at home. I'm just going to use the same setup with exposing my nextcloud server (not behind cloudflare)
I already have the jellyfin app installed and it's decent. My server is already running jellyfin inside docker.
Hello,
Pardon me to bring this up, but these applications, like Nextcloud, Nginx Proxy Manager, Jellyfin, PhotoPrism, etc, under docker / native or snap, aren't that resource hungry at all.
For Jellyfin, if play back clients are codec compatible then it would be direct streaming and during direct stream, there is practically no load in CPU / GPU.
You are only limited by the network and HDD Read speeds.
Here is my home server,
HP Z230 SFF
Intel Core i7 4790
(4x4) 16GB DDR3
Nvidia GT730 (2 GB GDDR5)
1x SATA 2.5inch SSD
4x SATA 3.5inch HDD
Running, Ubuntu 24 LTS Desktop with VirtManager along with Docker/Docker Compose.
I have Snap Nextcloud / Docker JellyFin / Docker PhotoPrism (Multiple deployment for each users), Docker Guacamole, Docker Torrent Clint, etc with the Host OS (U24D) and running a QEMU VM Via VirtManager with Ubuntu 24 Server. In that VM, I have docker nginx reverse proxy along with OpenVPN tunnel for internet exposing.
Here is the idle load
I have around regular 12 users of this home server. Me and my family and my extended family. It serves without any performance issue at all.
Only thing I would like to change is to move to TrueNAS based set up for using ZFS with a SSD cache. Since, even during direct streams, if I am having many users and they are all messing with their play heads (going back and forward), HDD based storage struggles to keep up with the reads for high bit rate content.
But these kinds of situations are really rare since not all users are streaming at once and going crazy with their client play head bars.
For a small family, even a basic i3 based system is just fine to host these applications without any performance penalty.
Thanks.
I see. That's cool. Iirc I have both my HDD and SSD on ext4 while iirc my R810 server uses Raid 1 or 5? I have the HDD configured as ZFS and for proxmox, ZFS Raid 0. I haven't used the server in a while and I can see that one of the HDD was about to fail. I transferred all the stuff I used to have on my R810 over to my zimablade. Ext4 looks to be more stable imo. I mostly use wireguard and haven't used openvpn for my servers since I like how wireguard is more simple and such. Jellyfin, idk why but I can't seem to get the GPU working but I'll figure that out later but everything else it's comfy