Hardware recommendations for a pure media station?

[TheDreadPirate]

For your user case, any recent-ish Intel CPU will do. Before I put an Arc GPU in my system, I was just using the i3-12100's iGPU and it could handle ~12 1080P transcodes in my testing (I don't actually have that many users).

12th gen and newer are much more power efficient than 11th gen and older, so stick with those. Unless you plan on doing other things, the 12100/13100/14100 lowest tier i3 CPU is more than enough due to how well Quick Sync can handle transcoding.

16GB of RAM, any motherboard with the features you want, not a garbage PSU under 500W (I like Seasonic and EVGA), a case with as many HDD bays you need, at least a 256GB NVMe OS + jellyfin app drive (I like Samsung or SK Hynix).