New hardware advide

[prekopix]

I want to build a computer for Jellyfin, and I currently have a mini PC with an N100 (8/256) and an i5-7400 with 16GB of RAM. I was thinking of adding an Arc A310 to the i5, but if the N100 is enough to handle transcoding, I won’t make the investment. At most, I would need to handle 3–4 transcodes at the same time. Any advice? What would be the best operating system?

[TheDreadPirate]

As long as those 3-4 transcodes are for SDR content, the N100 should be enough. HDR to SDR tone mapping is VRAM limited, which iGPUs, in general, have limited amounts of.

If you have a lot of HDR content, with non-HDR capable clients, a dedicated GPU of some kind is warranted. And the A310 would be sufficient for, worst case, 3-4 tone mapped HDR to SDR streams.

[prekopix]

Well, it wouldn't be too much HDR content, but I'll keep it in mind. I'll start looking into the A310 or A380. As for the OS, any recommendations?

[TheDreadPirate]

I'm kind of biased, but I prefer plain Linux and nothing else. But any kind of Linux is better than Windows, IMO. I do find the that "Linux + UI" options like CasaOS, unRAID, Open Media Vault, or TrueNAS Scale get in the way more than they help.

My recommendation is to learn Linux and get comfortable with the command line. Honestly, running just Jellyfin on Linux is actually pretty simple. Once you start to do more advanced stuff outside of Jellyfin, the learning curve will definitely become steep. But JUST Jellyfin on Linux is simple and, more importantly, well documented.