New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Can you run Jellyfin on a VPS without a GPU?
I've never used Jellyfin but I wanted to try it. Can you set it up in a way where it doesn't have to transcode anything, or it does very minor transcoding, in a way that it would happily run on a VPS?
Edit: I will mostly be watching on a PC or Android phone
Thanked by 1steeler
Comments
I'm wondering the same thing. It seems quite popular in the community, so I'm curious about how well it actually performs. Any long-term users willing to share their experience?
Sure you can, I don't know why you didn't just Google it which would've given you the answer immediately though.
Yes, what you are referring to is direct streaming, which matters about the video codec is it in not so much transcoding itself it's more of why does it transcode?
Hx265 you want to avoid this will require transcoding for majority of devices and needs heavy CPU / GPU, if you download exclusively Hx264 MEDIA which is supported by all devices since the 2000's, you will direct-stream all media and the client itself will handle it. Meaning 1 server, can saturate 1000's of streams to clients.
Your asking, what's the downside? well storage, 264 is much larger than compressed 265, the compression is what causes the GPU / CPU workload. you essentially have to "unpack" before it works.
265 blu-ray 1 HR can be often seen for 1-5GB, while in 264 it can be 10-15GB. depending on the releaser and how they have encoded it for you to download will depend on how good the 265 video actually is (There is always loss, but it's how much). over compressed side of the single 1GB will not look as good as original but 3-5GB will look identical to the larger 10-15GB file.
The "Golden Zone" are devices, which is certainly becoming more so that support codex such as VP9, H265 (the type that causes transcoding but are small in size) where the client can handle, therefore your servers' resources are thus again unaffected much but you have to check, verify all devices using your server are capable.
I found a lot of people saying they run it on a home PC without a dedicated GPU, but they still have integrated GPUs. I haven't seen many people talking about using it exclusively on a VPS where you have a shared CPU and no graphics acceleration
I knew there would be people here who know that though.
Thank you, I thought this may be the case. I'm not too fussed about quality so if size is a big problem for anything I might go with lower quality H264 for simplicity. Although it will only be myself using it so I don't really need to worry about which devices I'm using with it
I highly suggest you look into usenet, and on-the-fly streaming. No storage, no hassle just an index of files you have logged (Can work with your typical sonarr setups) and streams-on demand from 10GBPS servers for $5/month
The main reason I was looking into it is because I watched a Youtube video about something called ErsatzTV which looks awesome. I like the idea of making TV channels with all of my videoes
Can that be set up to work with Usenet?
Jellyfin is your middle ground, ErsatzTV can provide a ingestion interface for your live-streams
While something like alt-mount, either either file-structure linked to cloud URL's (mimics a typical media library) or via a jellyfin plugin that provides direct search results over usenet and streams on demand e.g no sonarr or radarr.
Then everything shows in 1 UI Jellyfin if you have no use for movies / shows then ignore my usenet suggestions
ErsatzTV cannot work or utilise usenet, as usenet doesn't have live-media.
I run my Jellyfin on a VPS with 4x EPYC 7763, and 20 GiB of RAM, it can very safely transcode for 2-3 devices in my household at a time (enough for the kids), my data is streamed from Google Drive mounted to the VPS with write-ahead configured and the streams for the tablets are locked to 1080p while the stream to the TV is preset to 4K, the tablet streams often get Remuxed rather than full on transcoded, which is good since it lets the VPS CPU not constantly be at 100%
If you are watching on a PC and an Android Phone, if you use the native Jellyfin app on the PC, you'll most likely never engage with server-sided transcoding and have the file be directly handled by the Jellyfin desktop app. The Android Phone will probably make use of Remuxing and work just as well too.
Thanks all
Any advice where to look to get started with Usenet for movies?
Easynews is huge, probably your go-to. You can use their search engine, or I’d advise getting another one. Good ones are around $10 a year.
To quickly explain Usenet, it gets way overcomplicated for no reason.
There are “news providers.” They don’t index anything like Easynews; they store the “bytes” of people’s uploads. This is how the whole system kind of avoids the typical problems others have. Then there are search engines called “Usenet indexers.” These are where the master file that knows all the parts of the data is stored. For the most part, all Usenet backbones have, or attempt to have, all the pieces, so it doesn’t matter which one you go with as long as it’s a good one.
TL;DR: NZB indexers are your .torrent, and NZB downloaders like Easynews are your P2P replacement. - Indexer's are more important as files are on essentially all backbones, knowing where they are is key!
For implementation into Jellyfin, look into “Gelato” on GitHub. It imports the entire Stremio directory so it knows every movie, then leverages a live search engine like StreamNZB, which handles the downloads, extractions, and live media passthrough to Jellyfin.
Doing it live like this will result in some delay when clicking on a movie, while the available options load and get filtered. If you don’t like the delay, stick with a typical Sonarr/Radarr setup with something like Altmount, which does the same thing but can link its indexed downloads from Sonarr as a local rclone mount, tricking Jellyfin into thinking the files are downloaded while still letting them stream.
Take a look at
https://github.com/infinidysk/infinidysk
https://www.infinidysk.com/getting-started/
Yes. You can. You never need GPU for most things. Even AI SLM work fine with CPU