Unsure about Hardware for Media Server

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No need to be nervous! Jumping into a new hobby should be fun. It can be frustrating at times, but that's part of the learning process -- learning a new thing is almost never easy.

As for hardware, the mantra is: match your media to your clients. In other words, make sure your clients are capable of playing everything you have on your server and you could basically run Jellyfin on a potato and not have to worry about it (seriously, a Raspberry Pi is enough if you follow this mantra).

Most folks don't get into this game before having a media collection, so that's not always plausible and most of the time it's in various formats with different codecs, etc... So let's start with a couple easy questions rather than make you more nervous.

• What kind of clients will your server be streaming to (e.g., Roku, Chromecast, AppleTV)?
  
• What do you mean by "1080p to 1080p max"?
  
• Do you use any virtualization like VMs, Kubernetes, Podman, Docker?
  
• Any network file systems or network-attached storage?
  
• Any other special requirements (e.g., 4K media, using AV1 codec, entire library is in HEVC/x265, everything has 7.1 Dolby Master Audio)?
  

Just from the surface, your use case is pretty simple. If your media library is mostly compatible with your clients (what you will be playing the media on), I don't see why your hardware would present a problem. You could consider bumping up the RAM, but it's not necessary. I don't think the Ryzen processors support any hardware accelerated transcoding, so likely wouldn't cope well with multiple streams, but I don't have much experience with CPU-only transcoding on AMD platforms.

If you really wanted to make 100% sure you could handle whatever you throw at your sever, you could get a basic GPU (you'd be looking for something like an NVIDIA 1060 or better to handle HEVC decoding). A lot of the cards in the cheaper range you'll probably only find used. Another option is an Intel ARC A380, which will do AV1 decoding as well and will run you $150. This isn't really necessary at all if you make sure that your media matches what your clients can consume, but you'll always find an edge case; it's up to you whether you want to prep for transcoding or just let the clients that can't play back the media deal with it.