Hardware recommendations for Jellyfin please?

[Metcardiff]

Hi, I am looking for some recommendations if anyone can help. 

I’ve got an Asustor 5304t at the moment with 2 x 8Gb iron wolf disks.  I’ve got Jellyfin running on it but 4k transcoding is slow. I’ve just bought some extra memory to try it at 32gb and see if that helps but….

I’ve also been digging around trying to find a second hand PC that I can pop these drives into and use that as a NAS and with Jellyfin on any of the free NAS software. 

 My biggest issue is the SATA 3 ports on a lot of these older computers. When I say older I just mean post 2017 as I only really want to pay around £150-£200.  I am pretty sure I can get a more powerful machine than. The asustor but the sticking point is they often say supports up to 2Gb disks even tho they are SATA 3

Although I am a seasoned computer person. ( I’ve been building my own off and on since the 90s ) I haven’t built one in a while and I don’t want to drop £200 on a workstation if the uefi won’t support it.  

Does anyone have any second hand PC recommendations that would do the job with 4k transcoding? It would only do one film at a time.  

Thanks for any help!

[bitmap]

So 4K transcoding, my understanding, is not dependent upon the hardware acceleration (i.e., the iGPU in your NAS) but on the CPU due to tonemapping, which can tax less powerful machines. Your machine should be more than capable if you aim for media that is fully compatible with your hardware or keep two separate libraries of 1080p or non-HDR/DolbyVision and another that is 4K+HDR/DV. I avoid transcoding 4K like the plague despite having a machine more than powerful enough to do so. I'd rather transcode and tonemap on my own with ffmpeg, where I have more control over parameters and create a scenario where transcoding is minimal if it happens at all.

[Metcardiff]

Thanks for your reply. I will look into converting them to a compatible format for an LG OLED.

[bitmap]

I have an LG C1, so I feel the pain. Supposedly jellyfin-ffmpeg7+ supports auto-removing DolbyVision. If you need to re-encode and inject the DolbyVision metadata back in, you can do so with dovi_tool.

[Metcardiff]

Hmmm on another note. Any ideas which open source NAS operating system generally has the most up to date Jellyfin?

Swapping from the ADM to one of those may be a an option.

[TheDreadPirate]

If the NAS OS can run docker, it doesn't matter which one you use. As long as the kernel they use supports your hardware.

[Metcardiff]

Thanks