Ideal Hardware for JellyFin

[Zachary Drake]

I have seen many posts where users have JellyFin running on their old gaming PCs, Macs or whatever else they had lying around. I have done the same but I think I am ready to dive deeper. I have JellyFin running on an old iMac 2014 at the moment, and I am really happy with it so far. But I want to really be able to use it heavy duty, like at least 10+ streams at a time.

What would be the ideal or recommended hardware for a heavy use case? I want to:
- Have something low power, that I can leave running all the time.
- Stream 4k Video at best possible quality.
- Run 10+ high quality streams at a time.
- Would a powerful GPU be recommended?
- Should it be a standalone machine or a VM?
- Any advantage for JellyFin between Linux, Windows, Mac etc?
- Use DLNA When possible
- Be prepared for JellyFin to Decode/Transcode whenever necessary without stuggling or running into issues.
- Remote access my home network with a VPN and stream even while not at home. Is there an advantage to having a VPN vs a Proxy server setup?

I am not very familiar with Docker, and right now I am running the direct JellyFin install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Any advantage to either method?

And I suppose my main question is what is the most important hardware to a JellyFin deployment? modern CPU? GPU? What should I be looking for?

[Efficient_Good_5784]

What would be the ideal or recommended hardware for a heavy use case? I want to:
- Have something low power, that I can leave running all the time.

If you want low power (use less electricity), you usually want hardware that will perform slower and probably not ideal for 10+ 4K streams.
If you plug in an external GPU, that will use power, even when it's not being used.
I would also invest in SSDs over HDDs to save on disk electricity too.

- Stream 4k Video at best possible quality.
- Run 10+ high quality streams at a time.
- Would a powerful GPU be recommended?

If your goal is to stream 10+ 4K videos, you can probably handle this if all the clients direct play instead of ask for a transcoded stream.
I'm not familiar with how much streams certain GPUs can transcode, but if you ever need to transcode 10+ 4K streams, I would imagine that you will need a top-end GPU to handle this.

- Any advantage for JellyFin between Linux, Windows, Mac etc?

Linux will be more stable than Windows (ex: you aren't forced to update the OS every month).
Linux also runs Docker better than Windows.
Can't comment on Mac since I don't use it.

- Use DLNA When possible

DLNA support is slowly dying off. Nothing Jellyfin can do about it.

- Be prepared for JellyFin to Decode/Transcode whenever necessary without stuggling or running into issues.

To avoid getting issues with HWA, make sure to enable the correct settings for your GPU and which codecs it supports. Any that it can't handle will be passed onto the CPU so that it can do the transcoding.

- Remote access my home network with a VPN and stream even while not at home. Is there an advantage to having a VPN vs a Proxy server setup?

The most simplest will probably be Tailscale which is a mesh VPN.
As for VPN vs proxy:

• VPN will encrypt data streams
  
• Proxy will only hide your IP address
  

I am not very familiar with Docker, and right now I am running the direct JellyFin install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Any advantage to either method?

With Docker, you can isolate services from the rest of your system. As in, you can have any service running through Docker and install packages along with it that would normally cause conflicts with the rest of your system because all of it will not interact with the outside system.
You trade a small performance hit to achieve way better portability. As long as a server supports Docker, you can run any Docker images on it.

[TheDreadPirate]

What would be the ideal or recommended hardware for a heavy use case? I want to:
- Have something low power, that I can leave running all the time.
- Stream 4k Video at best possible quality.
- Run 10+ high quality streams at a time.
- Would a powerful GPU be recommended?
- Should it be a standalone machine or a VM?
- Any advantage for JellyFin between Linux, Windows, Mac etc?
- Use DLNA When possible
- Be prepared for JellyFin to Decode/Transcode whenever necessary without stuggling or running into issues.
- Remote access my home network with a VPN and stream even while not at home. Is there an advantage to having a VPN vs a Proxy server setup?

I am not very familiar with Docker, and right now I am running the direct JellyFin install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Any advantage to either method?

And I suppose my main question is what is the most important hardware to a JellyFin deployment? modern CPU? GPU? What should I be looking for?

Low power is going to be pretty hard to achieve with 10+ users.  Especially if we are specing the system to assume a worst case of 10+ 4K transcodes with tone mapping.  And there are also issues of Internet bandwidth if most of those users are remote.

Here is how I would spec a system for this situation

- CPU/Motherboard - Anything recent-ish.  At least 4 cores.  Maybe 6, since audio transcodes occur on the CPU.
- GPU - Intel Arc A770 - Has enough VRAM for 8-10 4K transcoded tone mapped streams (tone mapping is very VRAM intensive).  Also has AV1 encoding support when that feature is available in JF 10.9
- RAM - 32GB
- OS Storage - 1TB NVMe SSD for OS + jellyfin data + transcode directory
- OS - Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04 (must use kernel 6.2 or newer, required for Arc)

If Jellyfin is the only service you are running on this system, just install Jellyfin directly on the OS.  No need to add the complexity of docker when you aren't benefiting from what docker brings to the table.  I have 5 Jellyfin instances on my server.  My "production" jellyfin is installed directly on Ubuntu and the other 4 test instances are in docker.

[Zachary Drake]

Super helpful info, thank you!