The ULTIMATE Budget Jellyfin Server 

You mean I don't need a 4090 and a 13900K for 4K transcoding?

Challenge to find a better Jellyfin server accepted! Will start by buying new kitchen sink to mount hardware in

That HP EliteDesk 800 G3 has to be the best small form factor PC. In addition to all the things you said it also has some PCIe Lanes that can be used for adding NVME slots. If you actually get your hands on one you could make a nasty little NAS. That would be an incredible project for the channel. 2x 3.5 drives (pick your capacity for backups) 1x NVME drive (for the OS) 2x NVME adapters for the PCIe slot (primary NAS storage, ZFS mirror optional)

Great video! This is why I keep old laptops around-recently repurposed an old work laptop (Intel i5-6200 CPU) for a 1080p Jellyfin server. The caveat with laptops is as you allude to-no internal storage space. Been thinking about migrating my server to something like this, though, as it would be much better (and give me an excuse to buy and setup another machine). Thanks for the inspiration!

I just bought a HP 800 G5 SFF w/ i5-9500 on Ebay which I was changing out my EMBY/Gaming server. Upgraded the RAM to 32GB. Actually a great PC. The 3 drive bays and 2 M.2 is very compact. Even has 2 PCI-E x16 (one at x4 i believe) and 2 at x1.

Because of you I bought a new server yesterday! It's an Optiplex 3050 with an i5 7500 and 32GB of ram. Thanks for your videos!

From both my research and experience so far, it's been worth the difference to at least get something with an 8th gen intel cpu. This in when the UHD630 igpu was introduced to replace the HD630 and is a transcoding powerhouse. Also, this is when i7 cpu's started coming with 2 additional cores making them 6 cores and 12 total threads(great for additional unraid things). A good example of a model with 8th gen would be something like the HP Prodesk 400 G5.

Great video! For a future video idea it would be cool to see you do a security camera NVR setup

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

I went with a Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF, 16gb DDR4, i5-7500. Currently have one 240GB SSD, and one 4tb WD hard drive (no redundancy so I'm rolling the dice) Installed Ubuntu Server 20.04 and running CasaOS. Setup a network share and copied my movies over to it. Installed Jellyfin and its working flawlessly. This is my backup media server, but it works like a champ! (And I run it off my small 350 watt solar panel setup, with a small 600 watt pure sine wave interter)

Thank you for this video. I just got a Zima board and adding jellyfin to the other Dri entry group got my trans-coding working! I'm so new to all this but chugging along.

Built my first sever pc running unraid for plex and makemkv after your 4K HDR jellyfin server video. Used some hard drives I had on hand and went for some really cheap parts. 16GB 3200MHz memory, 500GB 980 nvme for cache, 10TB iron wolf, H510M-E asus board with an intel 10100T i picked up for £30 from CeX. Case and PSU was a £13 used office pc unit from local pc repair store and dropped in the LG drive from your video, flashed to read 4K blu rays. Have ripped my entire 1080p and 4K HDR blu ray collection to it, direct play across my house with no issue on gigabit LAN. Thanks for the videos!

I have a similar system, but with an i5 7500 in it. I upgraded it to 24 gigs of ram to be able to run docker while running windows server. I even got a quadro p620 for video transcoding an video output, so now it works as a server/htpc.

One of these worked great for me, thanks for the recommendation.

A couple of months ago I moved our Plex server from its old home to one of these machines as a dedicated Plex server, running an i5-6500 and a bare-metal Ubuntu server install. It was a refurb system off eBay with an NVMe drive and a 500 GB HDD, which got replaced with the 8 TB media HDD from the old server. All I really had to do was install Plex, copy its directory over, and mount the HDD in the same filesystem location and it fired right up. We don't have any 4k media but it handles transcoding Blu-ray rips to my phone quite well. I also installed Jellyfin to try it out and while it works well enough, the version of WebOS on the LG TV in the living room is unfortunately too old for the Jellyfin app to run. Also unfortunately, the Blu-ray slimline drive from my 800 G1 SFF Proxmox server doesn't fit the bay in the G3 - the drive's too tall, believe it or not.

Wow! Small world... I actually bought that same ProDesk 600 G3 with the Pentium G4560 from that same ebay seller. Mine fortunately came in better physical shape than yours did. I dropped a 6TB HDD into it and use it as a backup drive on my network. You're right that it sips power! For my Plex server I have an i3-8100 running Linux Mint that I've been using for quite a while.

You've done got me hooked on these. Bought one last week, for jellyfin (went to Emby with it though). Just bought a M01-F1033WB with a 10th gen i3, that I'm thinking the power supply doesn't work. Should have it by Friday.

I chose as a base a board for the 8.9th generation of Intel, and an i3-9100, the board can be expanded to 64GB RAM (currently 32GB), I have much greater expansion possibilities plus transcoding and that's what I wanted when switching from i5-3450 [I checked and i3-9100 is even faster synthetically than i7-4770, and I also had it on hand, which unfortunately is not supported in Jellyfin for QSV], together with 2xSSD [Proxmox system] and 4x2TB [data] power consumption is at the level of 50W capable idle time during transcoding about 60W, temperatures do not exceed 40 degrees C, and most importantly, I found a used motherboard with 2x M.2NVMe [ASUS PRIME B360M-A], I managed to keep the expenses to about $200, and I have really great possibilities, I am very excited! Greetings from Poland!

Nooooooooooo, i needed one or two more of these for myself to finish the cluster :D But as it's too late now, i can wholeheartedly support you getting one, got two at the moment and i love them so far

Such convenient timing, our old Synology NAS died in the shop yesterday and I planned on replacing it on Monday. I think I'll just go this route and repurpose an old PC.

I found a listing for the 800 g3 mini ones that was just a ton of used barebone systems that were used in hospital workstations. Bought 2 for about 60 dollars, and so far bought an NVME, 16 GB RAM stick, and a Wi-Fi antenna for about the same. I hope to build a server capable of running Plex when I leave it at home and outperform my dual-core-quad-thread laptop when I take it with me. Decided to go with the 7700 processor, which is not the 7700T that eBay keeps recommending, and is more than capable (on paper) of running a gaming server or two. Honestly am just hoping I can run the h265 encoded plex media tbh... it's the only potential issue I would have.

Buddy.. you have one of the most intereseting channels on youtube. I really really really like your content and the way you approach hardware and projects. Keep it up, buddy :)

I wish hardware prices in Europe were that cheap, hard to find a deal over here 🙁

I love low tech Linux projects. I'm planning on building a jellyfin server for my girlfriend's house. Excellent content, man!

I found your channel since the 2nd video was out, i even forget i subscribed. It's nice to see you appear in my recommendation again

For reshaping metal like that, I’d highly recommend knipex plier wrenches. They can be steep, but sometimes easy to find depending on your local 2nd hand market. There’s also some equivalent wrenches from Irwin and Lennox that are cheaper new.

This is awesome, im currently going through a similar route as you took in this video, after watching your mini pc video i bought a used hp elitedesk 800 g3 sff for like 80 bucks, i wanted to make the ultimate home server on the cheap, including game streaming. i was amazed by the specs for the price: i5-8500 6 cores 16gb RAM 1TB ssd 2x 3.5 HDD slots 2x M.2 NVME slots (also supports sata m.2) and 4 pcie slots i ended up bying 16gb of ram for 20 bucks bumping it to 32gbs and $100 in total for the pc (not including hard drives) unfortuantely i found out you cant boot through the nvme drives no matter what you do, but they are recognized and can be passed to vms. i also ran into a hickup with the gpu i bought, i ended up getting a tesla p4 gpu which is enterprise but the machine is having issues recognizing it, ill have to continue to test. but i love everything in this video. im thinking of making a video about my results when its all set and done. love the content.

I have a HP ProDesk 400 G6 as my main docker host. This is an USFF machine with a i5-10500T and 16GB RAM. I run several containers on it, including Plex. Plex is also using the iGPU for transcoding. Pretty nifty little machine. Got that for €100 from a friend. Can't seem to find that deal anywhere else though.

My home server setup: Windows server with a cheap key. Run truenas core in a vm for zfs and pass the storage to windows through iscsi. I get a big shared drive on the network I can just pass media to, jellyfin will pickup the new files automatically. iscsi allows me to use postgres, which was the real reason for it. I got 32gb worth of ecc memory, a sas card, and 10 used 4tb enterprise drives (using 8 with 2 for backup) from ebay. Had on hand a ryzen 2700X, mobo, psu, case, low end gpu. Probably spent less than 200 for a decently powerful do-all home server. Using raidz3 as I have family photos and videos going back decades stored on there. I think I ended up with 21tb total of some pretty resilient storage.

I just bought one of these systems 3 days ago so I'm glad I got it before your video came out and the price is went up 😂 Great 2 bay NAS 7700 16GB 500GB NVMe for $145 can't beat it

The more stuff you stack on the software side the more needlessly complex your setup and troubleshooting will become. IMO TrueNAS is great for this kind of build, it functions as a hypervisor and has a Jellyfin plugin ready to deploy in the app catalog. Unfortunately to make it work though you'd need to get a slimline optical drive to 2.5 bay adapter though. Edit: Oops, I didn't notice the SSD on the board, that'll work fine as a boot drive for TrueNAS to. Either way adding a 3rd drive would allow for a RAID 5 and gain you some wright speed improvements and more space while still allowing for 1 drive failure!

Just picked up one of these recently for $65. Great PC

Do you know if the SATA controller on those pcs support SATA-PM protocol? Is so, it could support the QNAP Dual 2.5” SATA SSD to 3.5” SATA adapter in order to get 2 JBOD drives a single SATA port. And maybe even use StarTech M.2 to 2.5" adapters to get 4 JBOD M.2 drives into a single 3.5" bay on a single SATA port.

Don't forget to add ZRAM to the PROXMOX OS...it really helps Very cool...I have a few of those cheapo computers I build for my mother in law and such...these work great for PROXMOX builds and a few virtual machines...make sure you use SSD's or the performance of the virtual machines can be a bit sluggish! Keep em coming!!!!

The funny thing is, is that I have an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF with an i5-7600 32Gb ram running with a 128gb nvme boot and using a PCIe 4 port SATA card and 4 4TB SSDs. Hell of a home lab server for all in of around $150. I had the memory, nvme, and SSDs since I own an IT shop and rotate out business machines.

Greetings from Tripoli, Libya 😅 Man .. am always overwhelmed by ur content ..tnx a lot

I don't have anything that supports 4k, and size is one of my concerns. So I ordered a 600 G3 mini with an i5 6500T lol. Have a 2TB M.2 SSD, just need to decide on boot media and I'll be watching for a cheap 2TB 2.5" drive for a raid 1 backup. If I want 4k transcoding in the future, all it takes is a CPU upgrade.

Any idea on what the overhead is on running your media library off of your nas? If I'm able to pull data at 100mb/s over the network, I know I'm not reaching the throughput of some spinning rust, but I'd have to back up the media library anyways, right?

I got a DELL Optiplex 5070 USFF PC With i5-9500T /8Gb RAM (No disk) for $96.00. There's no much room for hard disks, just m.2 and 2.5" HDD, but it has USB-C and I'll put an ORICO 5 BAY with RAID though that, and maybe a 4 bay disk tower as a backup. 35W CPU, but enough power for transcoding and a lot more

I bought a month ago dell optiplex small form factor with skylake i5 processor so I can toy around in proxmox. It has only two 2.5" hdd spaces but otherwise I'm quite happy with it. Power consumption on idle is only 15W.

Where is a link to the table you have showing at 3:12? That looks really handy to have.

such useful content. tysm. 💌

One thing I’ve wondered is why people aren’t doing things like network storage. Since most of these builds don’t include drives, seems like it’d be no issue to instead run the stuff off of a smaller corporate or nuc style system and it pull your media off of a truenas or synology box

Would love to see this compared to an Plex server setup. thanks for the great walkthrough!

Ive tried using jellyfin in a docker container using rootless docker but i dont know enough to get it working. So i just installed docker with root privileges and added the dev/dri folder in the devices section of the docker compose file. Also i think i had to add the groud id somewhere in the compose file. Anyway, cant get jellifin to work on rootless docker. Hardware transcoding gets difficult.

great vid........i have thought about something similar to replace using plex on a shield pro (server) and shield (client).......honestly they are incredibly reliable and upscaling is def not a prob.......i would prefer something open source but honestly none of what i have seen is as polished or as reliable as plex and an argone40 pi nas

tl;dr: If you're used to having an old PC with a couple of disks just serving video, you're probably fine. There are severe limitations if you want to serve main storage to another device (compute node for a home lab or your main workstation). I've got a couple of the 800 G3's. First off... transcoding. Is this something that's actually time critical? If not, its probably something you can let the server chug along with and once its done, you're fine. Be aware of your use-cases. Speaking of usecases: If this thing is a main file server, you may well want to go faster, so you can centralise all your storage onto it. 3 small disks are better than two large mirrored for capacity and speed reasons... but they won't fit... unless you go for 2.5" inside the 3.5" bays, in which case you might start thinking of SSDs. If you're thinking of SSDs, you need a faster network to make use of them. 10G is fine with a single drive or stripped SATA SSDs, but then you start running into "not enough PCIE lane" issues. I made the mistake of thinking the 800G3 had 2x16 slots... one of those x16 slots is only wired for x4 - good for a single nvme disk. I ended up going for a very power inefficient older xeon, because it has 2 x16 slots and one x8 slot straight to the CPU. One x16 for an old server NIC (recommend 25G max, or the cables get expensive), and the other can be used for one of those expensive SSD carrier cards with a built-in PCIE switch (because bifurcation is a new and rare thing). Beware of motherboards with lots of SATA ports bottlenecked by the chipset if you want SATA SSDs, but SATA spinning rust for high-capacity/low bandwidth video are fine. Also, USB drives are (apparently) not recommended for truenas as drive identification can be uncertain (which sounds horrible). I know motherboards with dual x16 PCIE slots have fallen out of favour as crossfire and SLI died, but we now need them back for storage and high-speed networking - I'd like to do iscsi from SSDs just as fast as a local drive :)

I have the i5-7500 version of the system.... draws less than 17 watts idle.

might wanna copy that.. nice video!

Yeah I got a i5 8400 with a cheap MB (4 sata ports). Installed TrueNAS... And voilá... The 8400 runs great. Handling 4k HDR amazingly. The only problems I encountered were on the clients side. Server-wise... Its running great. Running a ssd for OS and cache and HDD for storage, 16gb ram... about 20w idle... Not bad

thanks for the video. So compared to an off-the-shelf NAS solution this saves around a 100€ (considering the cheapest 2bay QNAP NAS at the moment in my area goes for 180€)... But you bring up good points regarding the HW Transcoding, hadn't thought of those. Decisions, decisions...

I use my Mac Mini M1 as a Plex and Jellyfin server as well as being my photo video computer. With an external drive it works great as a media server. It is really low power and also great to rip your DVDs and Blu-rays, getting around 300 frames per second for encoding DVDs and 60 for Blu-rays. They are getting pretty cheap now they have been replaced with the M2 version.

Just picked up a g4 for my home server!

These would make a perfect NAS. Think I'll pick up a G4 and have it pull double duty as a Jellyfin server.

Hi, will there be an upcoming video about what you do on home server security?

Tip, in case you already have some storage solution in place (in my case: Synology NAS): I bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro for €100 to be a dedicated Jellyfin machine and it was by far the best decision! Super low energy consumption for amazing transcoding performance. That Intel N100 CPU is great! Highly recommend you check it out!

i'm attempting the same exercise for frigate. I need at least a 10th gen processor to get QuickSync. I also am looking for a dual NIC setup to isolate the video onto its own network.

I'm looking at making a new NAS box, mainly for Plex and Frigate, using an Erying motherboard (with mobile i7-11600H (well, an ES that's similarly speced) CPU on board, which has 2 Tiger Lake media engines), a RackSource 2u 12-bay rackmount case for storage, a low-profile SAS HBA (like a LSI 9305-16i) in the x16 slot, and a Coral TPU for the E-key slot so it can also run Frigate as an NVR.

The EliteDesk 800 G3 was on sale at Amazon for $107.00, so now I've got a replacement for my broken laptop. And with a cheap 2.5 Gb adapter, it's working as expected and stable. It even came with a 3 Tb HDD and Windows 10 Pro. Keep up the good work! 😊

You sound like Michael Bolton in "Office Space", who said that he always screws up by missing some normally trivial little thing... LOL... ;-)

i have been running jellyfin in my proxmox cluster, i was never able to get gpu hardware passthrough to work properly for the transcoding though

I just bought one but the 400 G4 for 65 quid. I want this to replace my Dell server which is not as used as I believed and that draws 60-70W compare to this which I hope will idle at around 20W and still be not 100% used by far. Should achieve Plex,Adguard,Transmission and few other jails plus a linux virtual machine without being not even 50% used. Hopefully will go well :)

Will the transcoding also work in a windows machine?

"Be sure BEFORE you click"... words to live by when online ANYWHERE... Makes me appreciate the "Are you sure?" confirmation pop-up...

I like it a lot. I'm still just opening a SAMBA share and opening media in VLC (caveman style!). I might have to step into the future... 🤔

Those Intel Chipsets support Hardware Raid, I would've used that instead of a software raid solution. You have to switch the SATA Mode in BIOS from AHCI to RAID, then at startup you can access the option rom for the raid controller.

That was what I was waiting

My Jellyfin server is an old laptop with a Core 2 T5800 2 GHz and 4 Go ram, running Linux Debian, with an external USB drive :) Of course, no transcoding with the integrated Intel video card. but I don't need it. If you don't need transcoding, about any computer can run Jellyfin.

I bought an Elitedesk 800 G5 with an AMD Ryzen Pro 3400G. It came with 16 GB memory on a single stick (unfortunately) and a 256 GB M.2 drive. It idles at 17 watts and has 2 m.2 sockets, 3 SATA connections and 4 memory slots.. but I didn't think to look at which video codecs it handles. The Ryzen might have been a mistake.. I'll have to get JellyFin on it this week and see what it can do.

How's this working out for you? I got the 800 G3 based on your recommendation in this video. I got it as a barebones kit for $49 and even bough a HP Blu-ray drive so I can start building my own Plex collection. I got the G4560 and 32GB of memory. I got a 2 TB SSD am just waiting on the money to buy me a couple of 14 TB HDDs to use for storage. My thought process was I could set up TrueNAS and install Plex, automatic-ripping-machine, & Tdarr via Docker. Goal is to make this a bare metal ripping machine for setting up my Plex collection and testing everything. Then later on when I have the money to set up a NAS I'll move the finished files over to that for a true Plex setup.

I just bought a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 with a i5 7500 today before finding this video for the exact same use case for 135 Euro with Shipping from the UK to Sweden without the Shipping it would have just cost me 80 Euro but in Sweden they go for more than my price with the shipping if you want one with a 7th gen cpu here the cheapest i found was 170 Euro. And I also scored a 14 TB Iron wolf 150 Euro that a kid had used to store his 4K videos for 2 Years so haven't had a rough life and many use hours. So in total my NAS that will run Jellyfin have cost me 285 Euro.

seems to me the mini/1L versions would be even better given they have the T variants of the CPU and still have all media transcoding. Smaller, maybe cheaper SODIMM, less noisy... But yeah they may be a bit more expensive on the used market as is and you cannot add the internal drives other than maybe 1x m.2 + 1x SATA 2.5. So you'd forego the storage redundancy or capacity for size and power consumption, but one could always later get a JBOD USB box.

I was trying some of the film footage you were showing because it looked familiar. Is it Exodus from 1960 starring Paul Newman?

I think the "ultimate budget Jellyfin server" is whatever old PC you have laying around

I made a Plex server out of a Dell Optiplex 3020. I got the Optiplex for free from my work but they go for very cheap and are nice for a plex server.

As a Canadian, I envy your ebay listing and shipping prices.

Hi there! If I have an old synology NAS what would be a good way to connect the PC to the synology NAS so I can make good use of the PC hardware while using the drives from the NAS?

Using an Hp 600 g1 with small ssd and single usb ssd for data. Just copy to another usb ssd occasionally for ‘raid’ 😉

I got this off of am for $132 ... HP Prodesk 600 G3 Micro Computer Mini PC (Intel Quad Core i5-7500T 2.7Ghz, 16GB DDR4 Ram, 512GB SSD, 4K Support, DP, USB 3.0, USB-C) Win 10 Pro (Renewed). It came with a DP to HDMI adapter. I am using my WD My Book 3TD external drive to store videos. I installed Jellyfin.

I already got an older Synology DS716+II NAS with INTEL Celeron N3160 running Plex on docker. It's not great for transcoding but by my streams are direct. I'm looking to get Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Mini PC Intel i3-7100T and make it dedicated Plex server with media mounted from NAS. Alternativly I might get Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny PC - i5-8400T and make it a Proxmox server with Plex and other services running under docker.

Forgive my ignorance, but is there any benefit to adding more RAM to a system like this? I watched this video and decided this is the route I need to take for streaming my media library, and I just purchased an EliteDesk 800 G3 off of eBay with the i7-7700 processor in it. Is there any benefit in adding more RAM than the 16GB it already has?

Should I just go for intel mini-pc for media centres? or ryzen is fine?

Hi @hardware heaven today i finally got my dell optiplex 7050 with i5 7500T and 16gb ram....what os do you recommend i have been using ubuntu server on pi...please suggest everyone

I like the idea of repurposing the old computers for modern day uses. Keep up the great work on the channel, much appreciated.

thanks for teling me what was that pc

oh no after you posted this and recently bought the mini pc version i kinda regret buying it because it doesnt have much expansion lol (sure it can work like jank stuff with m.2 to sata thing), also i didnt realize this version uses the non-t version cpu and full psu power instead of charger brick like mini does but still has roughly the same amount of power for both

what about the "motherboard + xeon cpu + ram" combos on Ali express or ebay like the "Qiyida X99 Moederbord"?

Do we need ecc memory for running zfs pool ?

i don't understand why transcoding is required. what are you watching on that can't decode (or whatever) on it's own? or do i not understand what transcoding is.

bookmarking this for later.... Using my last gaming pc: i9-9900k, added Radeon 6650XT, 32GB DDR4 3200MHZ with 3tb SSD and 8 TB HDD for all my movies. Looking for something cheaper as I dont wanna keep those components running 24/7

I love SFF PCs. Also that quantity of USB ports. 😂😂👍👍

Bought a G3 a month a go for my mom for office use and now a G4 for my self to make a server. What a versetile little machene.

It's been to hard for me to understand all the issues 'cause I'm a 'bit' far from all there servers/streaming))) So... what are basic steps (os, vm, etc. step-by-step) and good choices to get Jellyfin machine on 'naked' HP 400 G5 with two mirrored hdds?))

0:26 idfk why but the pat made giggle like a baby.

I’m running a Xeon W-2123 with 32GB RAM and Nvidia Quadro P4000 on a Windows 10 system with Plex.. Performance with transcoding is just to sad. Sometimes it tooks minutes to Watch an movie on the webapp. Or it stutters (Yes , i’ve Plex pass and HW encoding enabled)

Hey, I want to set up a home server that I can use for different things. I want to use it as a NAS, 2 Minecraft servers (1 vanilla and 1 modded), and something like Jellyfish or Plex for video streaming. What CPU and how much RAM would you recommend? As the Main OS, I wanted to go with TrueNas scale.

Nice video, do you know a save website to dowload the movies/series. Because the most websites are virusses.

Why run in VM at all and not direct OS on drive? Ignore shipping in actual total cost?

Check out deals on Intel 10th gen HP 290 G4's. Getting down to the $150-$200 range.

CasaOS would work fine right over top of OMV6 and then you would have raid available.