Hi selfhosted community. First off, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this.

I’m trying to look for a computer / server that can handle Plex streaming reliably (just family members so a few connections).

I’ve looked around and some people say to get a NAS but apparently the transcoding is not good on those. Others have said N100, but I’m not sure exactly which one to get so I’m at a loss.

I would just like something that is great today and a bit future proof in case I want to up my storage. I preferably don’t want to build an entire huge desktop PC but looking for something with a smaller footprint where I can hide it behind the TV or behind a desk if need be.

Thank you so much for reading, and for the help!

  • Jaypg@lemmy.jaypg.pwEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    An HP Elitedesk mini PC would be small enough to tuck away somewhere and have hardware accelerated transcoding support. Jellyfin recently enabled hardware acceleration for the latest Rockchip boards like the Orange Pi 5 so that’s an option too. If you pre-encode your media into a format compatible with everything you want to stream to then it doesn’t matter, just pick any hardware than can get on your network and run Linux.

    • DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      I am in the same situation as OP and this is the route I’m moving along. I got myself a used 800 G3 SFF based on a comment in a similar thread a few days ago.

      It feels like a fine machine that consumes less power, supports upto 64 GB of RAM (I got 2x16 with future upgrades in mind). But the most noticeable thing about it is that it has space for 2x3.5" HDDs that none of the machines this size have, apart from the NVMe disk I put in. I intend to put 2x4 TB disks in it in RAID1 mainly to store family photos and videos. I’m learning docker to set up immich properly- i don’t want to lose anything due to my stupidity in updating things.

      I have about a dozen questions regarding the same but I’m scared to put them all in a single post. But I’m trying to follow advice on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY and hoping things will turn out fine. Based on their recommendation, I’ve also obtained a used g4560 processor to replace the existing dual core processor (i think it is 4400 or something like that) it came with. I hope it’ll be sufficient for stremio/torrentio/RD that everyone is so pleased with.

      All in all I’m enjoying the journey of setting it up and my only fear is not of losing the data but of curating it to my liking and then losing the customisations in a fuckup.