Initial Thoughts
Hello friends!
This is something that's been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I'm also interested in the fact that there's a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google's position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.
Thing is I'd rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they're sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.
Completely wishful thinking setup
I'm not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here's my admittedly wishful thinking of what I'd like for a setup:
- DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it's HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I've heard great things about those.
- Jellyfin, obviously.
- NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
- Intel GPU, as I've heard they're very good at video decoding, but I've not looked into evidence of this.
- Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
- Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.
A few things with this:
- I don't know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD's dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
- God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
- I'd have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it's still something to look out for.
- Cost of hardware.
Wrap up
Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.
What are your recommendations?
Hardware support can be a bit of an issue with bsd in my experience. But if you're asking for hardware it doesn't take as much as you may think for jellyfin.
It can transcode just fine with Intel quic sync.
So basically any moden Intel CPU or slightly older.
What you need to consider more is storage space for your system and if your system will do more than just Jellyfin.
I would recommend a bare bones server from super micro. Something you could throw in a few SSDs.
If you are not too stuck on bsd maybe have a look at Debian or proxmox. Either way I would recommend docker-ce. Mostly because this particular jellyfin instance is very well maintained.
https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/jellyfin
Not really. It's more out of the curious of how DragonflyBSDs HAMMER2 filesystem works. I've good things about it and ZFS on FreeBSD. ZFS on Linux I've heard is still getting up to where it is on FreeBSD.
That's somewhat true. However, the hardware support in bsd especially around video has been blah. If you are interesting in playing with zfs on linux I would recommend proxmox. That particular os is one of the few that allows you to install on a zfs rpool from the installer. Proxmox is basically a debian kernel that's been modified a bit more for virtualization. One of the mods made was including zfs support from the installer.
Depending on what you get if you go the prox route you could still install bsd in a vm and play with filesystem. You may even find some other methods to get jellyfin the way you like it with lxc, vm, or docker.
I started out on various operating systems and settled on debian for a long time. The only reason I use prox is the web interface is nice for management and the native zfs support. I change things from time to time and snapshots have saved me from myself.