Hi, I’m fairly new to the self-hosted universe but I like the idea of self-hosting media (I’ve looked at Jellyfin and Plex). But as I understand this requires quite some money and a lot of work. I don’t think it’s worth it if I put in all that effort just for myself but I’d love to build a small private streaming between me and my friends. We used to share and swap blu-rays after all, so it would be cool to build a shared collection.
My question is if that’s possible and if anyone has experience with this? I’ve read that Jellyfin and Plex are meant as home-media-servers and I’m not sure what limitations that implies. Can people access the library from outside networks and will that affect the streaming quality/speed? What specs would the server need to ensure it can handle a bunch of users? Is there a software that is better suited for this use-case?
Thanks in advance for any help!
I am running plex server on a low power i3-7xxx. thanks to the igpu that thing can handle a few 1080p transcodes at once. Even 4K HDR transcoding is possible, though I never get more than one or two of them at the same time. Unless you need it to encode subtitles into the video or you have many simultaneous HDR to SDR conversions going at once any cheap old PC with an intel 7th gen or newer and igpu should do well. Oh, and I don’t think they can handle AV1, but that is still very uncommon.
Intel iGPUs work phenomenally for transcoding but a lot of people who share with others keep their 4K files in a separate unshared library and only share 1080p and below since they tend to require transcoding a lot more than everything else.