Good CPU for JellyFin server?

[bwbuhse]

Hi y'all, I currently have JellyFin set up on my personal desktop but I'd like to set it up on a dedicated server. I've never had a NAS of any sort, but I was planning to DIY one in something like a Fractal Node 802 with 4x8TB Seagate IronWolf drives to start and run TrueNAS Scale. However, I don't know what sort of CPU I'd need to be able to support transcoding. There'd probably only be 2 streams at a time, max.

I'm wondering what sort of CPU would be fine with this? Do I need a Core series CPU or would some Celeron be okay? Do I need an A380 GPU? Does this even make sense or would it be better to go with something like a 4-bay Synology that supports HW transcoding?

Hopefully that all makes sense, thanks!

[bwbuhse]

I guess doing more research, it seems like the Synology DS923+ doesn't support hardware transcoding and the DS423+, that does, doesn't have 10GbE as an option (and I'd really like multi-gigabit).

Would one of the Asustor NAS devices work okay?

[TheDreadPirate]

I'm running bare metal Jellyfin and Ubuntu and not TrueNAS + Docker (I'm assuming you would run JF in Docker). But my Intel J4205 (Apollo Lake, Pentium class Skylake based CPU and GPU/QSV) can handle three 1080p HEVC to H264 transcode streams with headroom for one or two more. The transcode quality is excellent.

From what I've read, and my experience, Intel based GPUs (iGPU or Arc) is the way to go for transcoding in Jellyfin. I don't know how much overhead there is when running Jellyfin in Docker in TrueNAS. But I imagine it isn't much, if any, because of the way Docker works.

I would say the biggest factor is whether you library is/will be encoded in AV1. And that would determine what range of Intel CPU are available that support AV1 decode acceleration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quic...d_encoding

So I would say you can go pretty low end with the requirements you stated.

[thornbill]

I believe the general advice given is something Intel 8th gen or newer for good transcoding performance.

[bwbuhse]

Thanks y'all! So sounds like I should be good with just a newer Intel CPU, and maybe I can throw in an A380 if I ever get to a point where I need AV1.