I really want to get into jellyfin streaming, but I am a noob and have not much knowledge about hardware and video tech, and I could need some help! Please apologize if some of my questions seem uninformed.
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My plan is to store my DVDs on an external HDD, I already have some movies stored with makemkv.
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I do not want to spend a lot of money, at least for now. Synology is out of question because of enshittification. But I don’t have 300-500€ to spend on a mini PC, for a project I might abandon.
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What I have is an old Raspberry Pi 3, where I could set up a Jellyfin server on.
From what I gathered, it will be slow AF, but I guess for trying out the technology it should be enough to start? -
I want to stream to mobile devices, for example an Android phone or tablet, or my Hisense TV. I know already there is no Jellyfin app for the TV, but I could imagine setting up another pi as a client for it.
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Now there is another problem: I do not really understand what transcoding is, or if any if my devices support the H265 codec making transcoding unnecessary.
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Can you recommend me a low cost setup, let’s say max. 150€? Would a Pi 4/5 work, or does it need to be a mini PC?
I am not really interested very much in 4k, but if it is possible, why not.
Bonus question: How easy would it be to setup remote streaming so my SO could watch with their android phone from home?
Rpi3 is pretty slow but you’re right it’s ok for testing.
Jellyfin doesn’t pretend to do external access well. Some people put a proxy in front of it, others do something like Tailscale to create a private network over vpn. Then you set up the Tailscale app on your mobile devices and it should activate for specific ip addresses or dns names.
Consider using tinymusicmanager to fix up all of your tv/movie metadata first.
These solutions would probably prevent you from using jellyswarm though
Without knowing much about, yes unless all servers are using tailscale. It’s simple to share hosts across tailscale tenants.
That’s getting more technical than what OP is doing though.
Noted, remote streaming will be an extra step I can tackle after I created my setup, it may easily work or may not.
I am just some rando but I think this poster may have meant tinymediamanager as opposed to tinymusicmanager. I use tinymediamanager and it’s great.
Thanks, you’re right
If you’re looking for mini PC recommendations, I have been very happy with my Beelink Ser8. It was chosen specifically for handbrake encoding and is an order of magnitude faster than my underpowered decade old desktop.
Edit. I just reread your post saying that you don’t want to buy a mini PC so disregard that advice but if you want to stream to TVs on a budget, I am a big fan of the Fire Stick. If you get them on sale, they’re usually available for half the listed price (about $25 when I got them). You can get them on ebay if you don’t want to support Bozos. Currently they’re very easy to configure and they work great as long as you can get over the clunky menu design.
It’s not that I don’t want to buy a mini PC. But for this little project I might abandon like my many programming projects a massive investment is just not worth it. I payed 300€ on a TV some years ago, I just cannot pay the double amount for a device I use for streaming. I might upgrade if Jellyfin turns out to be my companion, but then everything needs to work, remote streaming from outside my network included.
Thanks for your advice though. I will look into a used fire stick, but if I understand correctly, this would act as a jellyfin client for watching on my TV.
You’re correct. The Fire Stick would be a client. I currently use a Pi 4 as my server and it works great, but I use KODI instead of jellyfin. This means that nothing trys to transcode when I use it. However, my brother is able to connect to my server through Tailscale and he does some sort of GPU pass thru with a jellyfin container and as far as I know it works great.
You may want to check out https://www.thewebernets.com/ blog posts. I use some of the recommend setups for my movies and most look great, but I do use subtitles which I think he mostly skips in his setups.
I know nothing about Hisense TVs but a very cursory look tells me it’s a Fire TV? There’s a Jellyfin client for those, you just need to sideload it.
One more thought: my Synology NAS (I know…) came with 2 GB of RAM, which was barely enough for Jellyfin, even with nothing else running on it. I added 16 GB and it’s very smooth now, with several services running comfortably concurrently. So maybe don’t go for the smallest amount of RAM.
Nah, it’s a cheap Chinese TV with a random OS, so I guess I need to find a workaround. I don’t buy at amazon so I thought of another Pi.
Noted, RAM is important.
It doesn’t need much RAM, my file server/jellyfin server runs on an old laptop I just have sitting with the lid closed on a desk near my router. I RustDesk into it for anything I need, and I have a split VPN tunnel running at all times, so anything I acquire goes through another IP.
(Had a 256gb SSD laying around I put in it for the OS, and 2 1tb USB hhd’s hold media). Jellyfin runs on both our cheap Roku TV’s, and our phones if we ever wanted)
Transcoding is taking an already encoded file, e.g. in H.265 and “re-encoding” it to something else, e.g. to H.264.
This is usually done for clients that cannot natively play back the originally encoded files, or for reasons like bandwidth restrictions, subtitles, etc.
In theory you can get around that by originally encoding your DVDs to a format which all of your devices can play natively. Nowadays, on most modern devices you should be good with H.265. Best way would be simply to try: encode, copy over, play.
H.264 is supported by basically every not ancient device.
Remote streaming inside the same network is as easy as pointing the Android app to the server and logging in.
How do I find out what codec a file has? I guess there is a ffmpeg command to check and also to convert?
Does that mean I can rip all my DVDs to the H.264 format to be sure all devices can play the file? Is there a disadvantage using H.264?
With remote streaming I mean of course streaming outside of my network.
H.264 for DVD content is perfectly fine. H.265 will save a little storage, but that’s basically it.
If you need to go outside your network it will suddenly be a lot more effort. I’d suggest a Wireguard tunnel, but in theory you could also open up the server to the internet. But you better know what you’re doing in that case.
Okay, so without the need of transcoding I gather a Pi 4 or 5 may actually be fine? What about the rare case I get hands on a Blu-Ray, H.264 would not work?
I’m not very knowledgeable about this stuff either but I have my jellyfin setup on my main PC and store the movies/tvshows on external HDD. All I did was install the app(windows for now) and set the source folders and the basics(account password and such). Did not go into transcoding or any of the other stuff and besides some movie identification errors caused by wrong or similar names and subtitles with special characters I had no problems. Wanted to also try remote streaming but did not get much into it. But I’d be glad to help if I can.
