poop
I have IPMI and web interfaces for most gear, I just don’t want to have to carry a laptop in every-time I need to tinker.
I also have a bunch of AV switchgear and it would be handy to adapt a multiviewer to one of the VGA ports for monitoring that side of things too.
the Arr apps will automate downloads but you can go into their ui’s manually for overriding things when needed (like replacing a bad copy of a TV show for example), jellyseer/overseer handles requesting and adding new shows/movies to be monitored from a simple webapp that you would host on the server and give them a shortcut to on their devices homepage.
I’d go with a 12th gen or newer intel cpu, something small and entry level is more than enough like a 12100 or 12400, we just want the igpu to handle the occasional transcode, 16gb of ram, a cache SSD or two in a mirror, and a decent stack of HDDs of your choice, the OS can be anything you want but I suggest going with something NAS focused like unraid, openmediavault or truenas (jellyfin is not officially supported on truenas but it does work). if it’s a new build from scratch for long term archival of high quality media i’d start with at least 6 HDDs, with one for parity, if you can budget for 20tb drives for example that gives you a spacious 100tb of useable space with the ability for any one disk to fail without any data loss. you can then build that into a normal ATX PC case.
You can use windows or any flavour of linux but you will be doing more work to make them work properly, where the above solutions are more plug and play.
I would make sure their hardware is capable of playing as many file formats and codecs directly as possible though, when you get into hosting 4K media, particularly for full fat UHD Bluray rips, you will find apps built into TVs or lower end streaming boxes just cant do it and the server has to chug through transcoding on the fly, the igpu can do it just fine, but you should try to avoid it for maximum performance and image quality, so perhaps budget for an nvidia shield or something.
Plenty of players still don’t support AV1, though with a modern gpu you can brute force transcoding it on the fly.
I have a jellyfin test server running an an intel n95 and it can easily handle a couple of 4k AV1 to H265 transcoded streams on it’s own with decent image quality, but it struggles with 3 if the bitrates are too high. still, it’s more complexity than is needed considering AV1 only saves a small amount of space over a good H265 encode which are ubiquitous on the net.
I put of grabbing one of these when my work was clearing them out, giving them away for next to nothing.
Now when I actually need one I cant find one for less than the cost of my best damn server. and nobody seems to make a basic cheap one.
I don’t think he’s enough of an asshole to admin that instance.
You can get banned there for sneezing the wrong way.
Hell I once got banned for talking about being banned.
Is it related to this issue posted to the bsd forks github?
I cant help you directly as I run Jellyfin on linux, but that should be your first port of call. just keep in mind jellyfin on FreeBSD is 100% unofficial so you are on your own.
For maximum compatibility with all services you are limited in your choices due to DRM licence requirements.
You can mostly decrapify android based boxes via ADB to strip out much of the bloat, strip most of the telemetry entirely then block the rest in your firewall, and replace the launcher with a super barebones one like Flauncher but it will never be 100% perfect.
If you must be in full control of what is on the device and what it is doing, a small, low powered miniPC (intel n100 is a good chip for basic AV for example, 4k 10bit with perfect H265 and AV1 decoding) and use the operating system of your choice, but you are then limited in what you can stream via browser or third party apps, often in nowhere near full quality, again this is due to licencing and drm.
The best option is to avoid streaming services altogether and download your own content, then use an offline player like kodi or a server/client solution like Jellyfin (a free and open alternative to plex, with most of the base features well implemented) to play it.
I have an Onyx Boox tablet and use ubooquity as an ebook OPDS server on my unraid box at home, it has an online reader that’s pretty good, but I just download the ebook file to local storage and use the much better reader built into the system. I’m a slow reader so I dont have to do it often.
I haven’t really found a third party reader that is e-ink optimised and can seamlessly integrate an OPDS server. I’d like to find one, particularly if it has syncing between devices as I also use a foldy phone as my main device so it seems some use as a reader sometimes.
I also self host a huge archive of manga in Komga, and access that on the tablet and phone via a tachiyomi fork, it handles e-ink optimisation pretty well. It also doesn’t sync between devices but if I use the komga web reader it does, it’s just a bit power hungry on the Boox and has no offline functionality so I just manually keep in sync which isn’t that hard.
The UI is definitely better than it used to be, but nodered can do some more powerful stuff like pulling the html of a devices web ui and parsing data straight from the page when there’s no API to use for example. I used to do that for a solar inverter at my last house.
Now I use it to control my AV switcher that distributes video through the house, it has no native homeassistant integration and only supports things like control4 and RTI so I implemented my own control using their REST API and hooked it all up to buttons and selectors in homeassistant. works great.
Also my home theatre receiver has a homeassistant integration but its terrible, so again, I’ve manually implemented the tcp controls in nodered.
I run nodered within Homeassistant in a vm on one of my nucs, I do all of my actual automation in there and homeassistant is just an IO layer for zigbee and bluetooth stuff.
With Google domains transferring to Squarespace I’ll be transferring my one remaining domain with them to something else soon enough.
I already moved all of my other domains over to a local provider I use for work that has treated me well, but this one last google domain address has my self hosted services on it and I was using some features that I didn’t want to have to transfer so I kept it with google. I was using their ddns service too but my IP is now sticky (effectively static but can change in some rare circumstances) and it has only changed once in the last 3 years so I think I’ll just manually manage the A records if needed until I either go fully static or use a third party ddns provider. I also use email aliasing to use me@mydomain with gmail.
I have some rare media that I know would be extremely difficult to replace, so I back that up, but the general stuff is less important.
However, with rights holders constantly trying to move away from the idea of permanent physical ownership, some media will become harder and harder to find in their best or purest forms, disks will go out of print and the used market will start to slowly die as media ages and rots.
The difference you see is probably due to different post processing presets, you could probably tune kodi to look better but in general it was designed originally for very low power devices and never added a lot of enhancement functionality outside of a few plugins for it. Try using the older kodi+dsplayer version for more tweakability or look I to madvr for massive image enhancement capabilities
The only reason I have kodi installed on my main nvidia shield is because it’s the only player ive found that will play back surround and atmos audio files (multichannel Flac and Atmos M4A) without then having to be in video containers. So it works well for my surround hifi rig.
I use plex and jellyfin for video
Jellyfin is great but it’s nowhere near feature parity with plex. I run them side by side. Jellyfin for my personal local playback and plex for everything else.
I’ll switch over eventually but for now, for someone with over 110tb of content and over a dozen remote streaming clients there is nothing better than plex.
These are definitely the way to go, plenty of fanless mini pcs with at least 2 NICs aimed squarely at this use case.
And even the little n100 chip is more than most normal people need for a router, even with an encrypted VPN or deep packet inspection, so you can virtualise and run some light services alongside the router OS, like jellyfin, a caching service, or something like Grafana
I stopped using Calibre a few years back since I didn’t need any of its advanced management/conversion features or e-reader integration any more so I switched to ubooquity, which is much simpler and doesnt need to rename or move files, you just point it at a folder and it makes books available via a simple web-ui and OPDS service. I dont actually even use it though, since I just pull the files to my Boox tablet when I need them.
I also run that alongside Komga which does the same thing but is better suited for comics and manga etc, I do access that via OPDS.
In the past I’ve used Volumio, but they’ve made multiroom a paid feature now.
One way around it would be to run a chromecast or airplay client, as they both have inherent multizone support, just not as polished as a sonos-style setup with groupings and stereo mapping when using DIY hardware.
The best way to improve plex/jellyfin performance is to make sure your players support what you are trying to watch and transcoding should only be needed if you are sharing remotely to someone with either slow internet or a crappy old player.
Of course, with hardware encoding the chip in that little computer can do what you are asking, including doing it at 4K if needed.
Thats a pretty old calculation that doesn’t take into account hardware acceleration, which modern chips can do very, very well.
So you can get away with a celeron class intel chip (or whatever they are calling them these days) and mange multiple 4k to 1080 transcode streams without issue.
I have a mini PC with an Intel n95, which is around 5500 on the passmark chart, but can easily churn out 10+ 1080p to 1080p transcodes if needed, of course the ideal setup is to avoid transcoding wherever possible. that’s not my main server, but it’s nice to know that if I wanted to I could move my plex server onto it and it would be fine.
There are a few models available with 1920x1080 displays, but they are mostly still 4:3 screens and VGA inputs.