Ideal Hardware for Jellyfin

[HelpingAnt98]

I have seen many posts where users are running Jellyfin on old Gaming PCs, Enterprise grade Servers, and Storages. I have been running Jellyfin on my Gaming PC for about 6 Months and then switched over to my Synology NAS for about 2-3 Months. Sadly the performance on my Synology isn't that great when it comes to streaming on the phone. Im watching most of the stuff on my phone and therefore transcoding is needed which is very bad on the Synology.
Since it's really a pain to watch anything over my NAS installed Instance and I don't want to keep my Gaming PC on 24/7, I want to build a dedicated System for Jellyfin.

What would be an ideal Hardware choice for a home use case? I'm only having about 1-2 Streams at the same time, I want something low power to keep it on 24/7 - PoE would be nice but not a must. Most importantly I want a good performance like im having on my Gaming PC / similar to that. The Build wouldn't need much Storage since all of my Media is stored on the NAS. Is there maybe a prebuild solution for my usecase something like a Raspberry Pi etc.?

[Efficient_Good_5784]

The ideal hardware choice would be to install the Jellyfin server data onto an SSD. Most likely the reason the Synology was not great for you is because the OS is installed on HDDs only (unless you made an all-SSD build). That also means that all Docker containers will be installed on the HDDs too.

You could make your own PC or buy a pre-built one that you can make sure has an SSD for the core services and for Jellyfin to be installed on.
I've seen some people also go with an Intel NUC too, and those don't use much power.

If you still want to go with a NAS, I would recommend Unraid or Truenas Scale. Note that I wouldn't recommend Truenas Core as its support for Jellyfin is really bad since it's built with BSD.
You basically buy your computer parts and build the PC, then install either Unraid or Truenas Scale on it. You can choose to install Jellyfin on an SSD then.

If you're worried about power consumption (since you don't want to leave your gaming PC on 24/7), just make sure to get reasonable parts. You don't need a GPU for example if your CPU has an iGPU if you want HWA for Jellyfin, and having a GPU doing nothing still uses some watts at idle.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Pis are not recommended, as per the documentation. For your use case, a Mini PC running an intel chip with an iGPU seems the best bet, such as the NUC recommended above. Because there's probably thousands of options on what mini pc to get, your best bet is to refer to the hardware selection section of the docs and use that as a rule of thumb on what to get. Just remember to aim for an intel chip since the documentation lists encoding quality currently as

Encoder Quality: Intel > Nvidia > AMD > Apple

Other than that, just use common sense and don't make hasty purchases; research components properly and adjust accordingly to your budget and use case.

[Fate]

I would recommend going for a intel minipc with n100 or similar cpu. They have powerful iGPUs and low power consumption.
You can fit 1x 4TB nvme SSD is most systems.

If you want more storage with HDDs I would recommend building a small system around an Asrock N100DC-ITX. Then you can have 2x Sata HDD + 1x m2 ssd.

[HelpingAnt98]

The ideal hardware choice would be to install the Jellyfin server data onto an SSD. Most likely the reason the Synology was not great for you is because the OS is installed on HDDs only (unless you made an all-SSD build). That also means that all Docker containers will be installed on the HDDs too.

You could make your own PC or buy a pre-built one that you can make sure has an SSD for the core services and for Jellyfin to be installed on.
I've seen some people also go with an Intel NUC too, and those don't use much power.

If you still want to go with a NAS, I would recommend Unraid or Truenas Scale. Note that I wouldn't recommend Truenas Core as its support for Jellyfin is really bad since it's built with BSD.
You basically buy your computer parts and build the PC, then install either Unraid or Truenas Scale on it. You can choose to install Jellyfin on an SSD then.

If you're worried about power consumption (since you don't want to leave your gaming PC on 24/7), just make sure to get reasonable parts. You don't need a GPU for example if your CPU has an iGPU if you want HWA for Jellyfin, and having a GPU doing nothing still uses some watts at idle.

Thanks you for your quick reply, I have only HDDs in my NAS which truely could slow down the performance. I Think the main reason is the slow cpu/ no gpu so transcoding to my IPhone is pretty resource intensive or even too much for the NAS. I don't really want to upgrade my NAS for this usecase since it's doing it's purpose just fine. I'm thinking about a mini-pc to which I map my NAS as a Network Drive. Thats how im doing it right now on my gaming PC and it's working like a charm. I think i will look out for a prebuild mini-pc with power efficient parts. Thank you!

Pis are not recommended, as per the documentation. For your use case, a Mini PC running an intel chip with an iGPU seems the best bet, such as the NUC recommended above. Because there's probably thousands of options on what mini pc to get, your best bet is to refer to the hardware selection section of the docs and use that as a rule of thumb on what to get. Just remember to aim for an intel chip since the documentation lists encoding quality currently as

Encoder Quality: Intel > Nvidia > AMD > Apple

Other than that, just use common sense and don't make hasty purchases; research components properly and adjust accordingly to your budget and use case.

I have also read about Pis beeing bad for this use case. I Think a Mini PC is the way to go for me. If you have any recommendations for prebuild ones please let me know!
Thank you for your help!

I would recommend going for a intel minipc with n100 or similar cpu. They have powerful iGPUs and low power consumption.
You can fit 1x 4TB nvme SSD is most systems.

If you want more storage with HDDs I would recommend building a small system around an Asrock N100DC-ITX. Then you can have 2x Sata HDD + 1x m2 ssd.

That's also what im thinking about. Storage wouldn't be a problem here since I would just Map my NAS a Network Drive, this should do the porpuse just fine. I think a Mini PC with a rather small SSD would be enough to install OS and Jellyfin + some other Stuff. If you have any Prebuild mini pc recommendations please let me know.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Currently I'm experimenting with a secondary/test Jellyfin server hosted from a docker container using one of these. Now, I got mine when it was discounted at around 158 bucks; so far it seems like a great, low power and affordable choice for a media server. Only aspect I'm not a fan of is that I had to email Beelink to get BIOS updates. Their support team also doesn't have a super solid grasp on the English language, and documentation is lacking. But everything has worked pretty great and the 12th gen intel chip is very solid for transcoding.

[pxr5]

I had JF running in Docker on a Synology NAS and have just moved it to an N100 Alder Lake Mini PC running Win 11. I much prefer the Mini PC (as my NAS couldn't do any transcoding) and JF runs really sweet. The PC's iGPU will even transcode 2160p dovi files without breaking sweat. If you go the mini PC root get 16GB RAM minimum.

[alb123]

Currently I'm experimenting with a secondary/test Jellyfin server hosted from a docker container using one of these. Now, I got mine when it was discounted at around 158 bucks; so far it seems like a great, low power and affordable choice for a media server. Only aspect I'm not a fan of is that I had to email Beelink to get BIOS updates. Their support team also doesn't have a super solid grasp on the English language, and documentation is lacking. But everything has worked pretty great and the 12th gen intel chip is very solid for transcoding.

So, do your movies/shows reside on a NAS?  I've never used any storage that wasn't connected to a traditional PC/Server.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

My movies reside on a bunch of external drives attached to my jellyfin server which shares them on my network using NFS. I plan to move them all to DAS fairly soon, though.

[Vagrantly4]

I had JF running in Docker on a Synology NAS and have just moved it to an N100 Alder Lake Mini PC running Win 11. I much prefer the Mini PC (as my NAS couldn't do any transcoding) and JF runs really sweet. The PC's iGPU will even transcode 2160p dovi files without breaking sweat. If you go the mini PC root get 16GB RAM minimum.

So are you able to run 4K to 4K transcoding on the N100's iGPU (Using QSV, I presume)? Does HDR tone-mapping work as well?