Hardware Spec Recommendation

[TheDreadPirate]

Storage: The OS, Jellyfin app data, database, and transcodes should be on their own SSD. Doesn't matter if SATA or NVMe. Either is fine. Your media can be on a HDD and that should be able to handle 12 users.

Media Formatting: If you want to avoid transcoding, you should encode your media as H264 video, AAC stereo, with burned in subtitles or external SRT subtitles, in a MP4 container. That is the most compatible format.

Transcoding: If you want better storage efficiency you can use HEVC or AV1, but that will definitely need transcoding on a lot of client devices. With 12 users, you should plan to have a dedicated GPU to handle transcoding. An Intel Arc GPU is the most cost effective GPU and even has AV1 codec support. You should avoid having 4K HDR content on your server since even with a dedicated GPU that is a difficult task to handle with that many users.

OS: If you don't plan on having actual VMs, and are only using containers, it would be much simpler and easier to just install Debian or Ubuntu and using Docker. We have a lot more documentation for supporting that kind of setup.