Ideal Hardware Configuration

[Ismail_A]

Hey everyone!

I'm very new to the self hosted media space (as in I have never done something like this) and I need some help from you good folks here as after lots of research this amazing software seems to fit my use case the best.

My use case is both simple and complicated. All I want to do is stream my film and tv collection. The catch is all the media is going to be ripped from my 4k blu ray collection using MakeMKV and if there is no 4k release of a piece of media, it'll be remastered by myself to be as high quality 4k as possible.

From my understanding from the research I've done, multiple 4k streams are a lot more hardware intensive than multiple 1080p streams and so the hardware must be a certain spec to be able to handle it.

There will be 6, maybe 7 4k endpoints that I'd like to have access to the media in the server. It will mostly be using the Apple TV 2022 128gb version because (as far as I can tell) there isn't native support for Samsung Smart TVs and I'd like to keep the setup for this as simple as possible.

In terms of my hardware build, everything but the GPU will be brand new and although there isn't a set budget I'd like to be as budget conscious as possible.

The current build is:
Case: Fractal Define 7 Black Quiet Mid-Tower
CPU: i5 13600
Motherboard: ASUS TUF B760-Plus WiFi D4
RAM: 32gb DDR4 3200
GPU: Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000
Boot Drive: 1tb Samsung 980 Pro
Storage: 20tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro
Power Supply: Corsair 750W 80+ Gold
OS: Windows 11 Home

The two things I can't change are the GPU because it's something I have from my old workstation and the OS. As much as I despise Windows 11 I have never used a LinuxOS before and I'd prefer to know how to do any troubleshooting in case anything goes wrong. Everything else is open to change

Although there are at most 7 4k endpoints, realistically only 2 maybe 3 will be used at once, but I'd like to build this server to be able to handle a worst case scenario.

Thank you all for reading and for any support or guidance you can give!

And thank you to the amazing team at Jellyfin for developing this software for free! It's truly incredible and an absolute godsend to people like me! 💜

[TheDreadPirate]

If you aren't transcoding or tone mapping, you are going to be disk IO or bandwidth limited before anything.

4K isn't the problem. It's tone mapping HDR. Because of how computationally expensive tone mapping is compared to just transcoding, the suggested setup is to have 4K HDR content in a separate library and pre-transcode and tone map your 4K HDR to 1080P SDR to use in your main library. If your setup supports 4K HDR, the content is there and no transcoding or tone mapping is necessary. If a user's setup doesn't support 4K HDR, having the 4K content in a separate library prevents a user from accidentally forgetting to switch which version they are watching.

In terms of just transcoding, the RTX 5000 should easily support 7 users. You MIGHT be able to support 7 tone mapped streams as well, if you don't want to pre-transcode and tone map your 4K library. The Intel Arc A380 can do 5 and it is my understanding that the 6GB of memory is the limitation. So having 16GB on your card should enable more tone mapped transcodes.

[toytown]

The Arc380 can certainly do 7x 2160p>2160p HDR>SDR and 10x 2160p>1080p HDR>SDR (preset SLOW) transcodes to H264. So if you don't anticipate any more clients than this, i wouldn't bother splitting your library and having different resolutions.

[Ismail_A]

1699468100[/url]']
If you aren't transcoding or tone mapping, you are going to be disk IO or bandwidth limited before anything.

4K isn't the problem.  It's tone mapping HDR.  Because of how computationally expensive tone mapping is compared to just transcoding, the suggested setup is to have 4K HDR content in a separate library and pre-transcode and tone map your 4K HDR to 1080P SDR to use in your main library.  If your setup supports 4K HDR, the content is there and no transcoding or tone mapping is necessary.  If a user's setup doesn't support 4K HDR, having the 4K content in a separate library prevents a user from accidentally forgetting to switch which version they are watching.

In terms of just transcoding, the RTX 5000 should easily support 7 users.  You MIGHT be able to support 7 tone mapped streams as well, if you don't want to pre-transcode and tone map your 4K library.  The Intel Arc A380 can do 5 and it is my understanding that the 6GB of memory is the limitation.  So having 16GB on your card should enable more tone mapped transcodes.

Thank you, that's really helpful to know. I completely forgot about HDR but luckily all of the 4k endpoints do support 4k HDR although some are just standard HLG while others have HDR 10, 10+ and Dolby Vision. Would this make a difference to the tone mapping side of things?

Thanks!

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1699470150[/url]']
The Arc380 can certainly do 7x 2160p>2160p HDR>SDR and 10x 2160p>1080p HDR>SDR (preset SLOW) transcodes to H264.  So if you don't anticipate any more clients than this, i wouldn't bother splitting your library and having different resolutions.

That's awesome, thanks!

Do you see any potential bottlenecks in the system that could be fixed with a high spec component, or even somewhere where I've gone overkill so the system could be cheaper?

Thanks you!

[TheDreadPirate]

I wouldn't say anything is overkill.

As for some of your devices only support some HDR specs. Jellyfin can only convert whatever kind of HDR to SDR. There is no "one kind of HDR" to "another kind of HDR" transcoding. I'm actually in the process of converting my Dolby Vision (mostly 7.6) content to HDR10 since just about everything that supports HDR supports HDR10. Still figuring the process out, though.

[Ismail_A]

1699481381[/url]']
I wouldn't say anything is overkill.

As for some of your devices only support some HDR specs.  Jellyfin can only convert whatever kind of HDR to SDR.  There is no "one kind of HDR" to "another kind of HDR" transcoding.  I'm actually in the process of converting my Dolby Vision (mostly 7.6) content to HDR10 since just about everything that supports HDR supports HDR10.  Still figuring the process out, though.

Ah okay I see. In that case I think I'm probably going to keep all of my rips as normal and see what happens on each client and troubleshoot from there. Pushing everything to HDR10 sounds smart. Definitely something I'll look into over the next few months,