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.

  • My plan is to store my DVDs on an external HDD, I already have some movies stored with makemkv.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • thegr8goldfish@startrek.websiteEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • gigachad@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      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.

      • thegr8goldfish@startrek.websiteEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        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.