Ideal Hardware for JellyFin

[Zachary Drake]

I have seen many posts where users have JellyFin running on their old gaming PCs, Macs or whatever else they had lying around. I have done the same but I think I am ready to dive deeper. I have JellyFin running on an old iMac 2014 at the moment, and I am really happy with it so far. But I want to really be able to use it heavy duty, like at least 10+ streams at a time.

What would be the ideal or recommended hardware for a heavy use case? I want to:
- Have something low power, that I can leave running all the time.
- Stream 4k Video at best possible quality.
- Run 10+ high quality streams at a time.
- Would a powerful GPU be recommended?
- Should it be a standalone machine or a VM?
- Any advantage for JellyFin between Linux, Windows, Mac etc?
- Use DLNA When possible
- Be prepared for JellyFin to Decode/Transcode whenever necessary without stuggling or running into issues.
- Remote access my home network with a VPN and stream even while not at home. Is there an advantage to having a VPN vs a Proxy server setup?

I am not very familiar with Docker, and right now I am running the direct JellyFin install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Any advantage to either method?

And I suppose my main question is what is the most important hardware to a JellyFin deployment? modern CPU? GPU? What should I be looking for?