Self-hosted media server to share with 5+ people?
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It's doable. I personally run my Jellyfin instance publicly available and there's maybe 3 people who use it regularly. With my internet connection, WAN side users are limited to about 720p but I've had the 3 of us all playing different media at the same time on occasion. The main limiting factors on the number of simultaneously active users is how much upload bandwidth you have and how quickly you can transcode video files. Any 10 year old box will be able to handle 1 or 2 users at a time provided it doesn't need to do a bunch of transcoding. If your building a box, would use a 11th or 12 gen Intel or if you must go AMD, have a graphics card to handle the transcoding. The "build a box" route can probably handle 4 or 5 simultaneous users, possibly more depending on your hardware choices. The main limiting factor in that case would be your upload.
That's pretty much what I just recommended aha, 12th gen or higher, or a GPU. Doesn't have to be a large one either - my GTX 970 could handle Emby transcoding as well as blaze through speech recognition for a local voice assistant
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IIRC the free version of Emby doesn't throttle in any way, you can still have up to 10 concurrent active devices and the only thing you miss out on really is OpenSubtitles. But I've recently upped my game with Sonarr and it's a dream. One day I'll put my movies into Radarr.
My server that I host emby on is an unraid setup and using the "automated ripping machine" docker has been super handy for transferring my physical discs into dogotal form for proper preservation.
Completely unrelated, but did you know that most local libraries have music on cds and movies on dvd/blu rays that you can checkout for free with a linrary card?
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I use plex mainly but run jellyfin alongside it for people that watch on mobile.
I started with my old desktop that had an Intel cpu with quicksync and put unraid on it, i started with 2tb disk and gradually switched over to 14tb drives now I'm at 100tb
I have several famy friends coworkers using it now, at first no one was really interested but as streaming prices went up and content got more dispersed people started jumping on board.
Now multiple friends setup their own servers so its really good coverage especially if I need to take mine down for maintenance the wife can keep watching stuff from other people's servers.
Things you need to find out is if you are behind a cgnat or other isp issues
Do you charge them for it? I talked to my friend about it and he was willing to pay me for mine, even though I offered it for free.
Because of electricity use, hardware, time spent setting up/maintaining, the risk involved for me, his access to unlimited infinite media.
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In my opinion it doesn't really make sense to factor that in. A NAS is a multi-purpose device. In this specific example they would be using it as a media server but that's not its only purpose nor the only purpose it should be used for.
Additionally network attached storage can even be an old computer that you don't use anymore. It's extremely difficult to factor the price of a NAS into an anecdotal response like this and be even partially correct.
Some will be free. Some will be $5,000. Some will be $250. It really depends on your needs, what you have, and what you want out of it.
For example I already had a NAS when I set up jellyfin. I run the server on my local computer to give it access to my GPU for transcoding services and all of the files are saved on the network storage.
So anecdotally what I include the price and to what it cost me to set up jellyfin? I already had the NAS, I didn't have to invest anything... Additionally you don't need network storage you could set it up on your local PC.
It's simply a difficult question to answer.
As an example, I used an old PC and purchased a PCI-E card with a bunch of SATA connections. So the cost was about $30 for the SATA card. The biggest cost was the drives, about $90 per 4TB (x5 because I'm using a ZFS raid setup).
I'm buying 10 more 12TB drives (and 2x 2TB NVME drives) for a future expansion which is when I'll retire my current gaming PC to be the NAS and donate the current server to whoever needs it. If you buy a dedicated device it'll be more expensive but you won't need to install Linux on it or configure it, they'll usually have easy to use software accessible via a web interface. If you're comfortable with Linux you can use just about any hardware to get you started.
Like Xanza said, I don't consider it part of my media server. It's generic storage that I use for everything. Security system recordings, backups, AI models, self-hosted cloud services like NextCloud, storage for my various syncthing clients, etc.
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Do you charge them for it? I talked to my friend about it and he was willing to pay me for mine, even though I offered it for free.
Because of electricity use, hardware, time spent setting up/maintaining, the risk involved for me, his access to unlimited infinite media.
No i don't but some of them send me money every once in a while just because they use plexripper to download from my server to theirs, I'm going to be running the server anyways so people using it feels better than it sitting idle
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You need any kind of mobo/CPU combo, I've heard 12th Gen Intel onwards are as capable of transcoding on the fly as an older GPU so you wouldn't need both, but if you go older I recommend a GPU as well, just because it gives more flexibility with being able to use hardcoded subtitles without locking up the CPU, and streaming a lower bitrate version of the video if your internet is shit, instead of - again - locking up
For easy certificate management I use NginX Proxy Manager, for media I use Emby and for a domain I use Cloudflare but you can absolutely serve your server with DuckDNS or another DDNS service for free.
I paid about £200 to build my server, and holy fuck it's so much cheaper than any subscription. Electricity is about £3-£5 a year and other costs are optional
That CPU is a bit spicey
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I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.
A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.
Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user's device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).
If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.
This doesn't need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play).
If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you'd need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential. Transcoding would be where you need to put more money in so the server is powerful enough in terms of CPU or graphics card to serve up 5 high quality streams at a time.
Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you'd either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)
I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.
Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.
Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.
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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!
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My server that I host emby on is an unraid setup and using the "automated ripping machine" docker has been super handy for transferring my physical discs into dogotal form for proper preservation.
Completely unrelated, but did you know that most local libraries have music on cds and movies on dvd/blu rays that you can checkout for free with a linrary card?
I did, but completely forgot! I haven't used a local library in years >.<
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I did, but completely forgot! I haven't used a local library in years >.<
They still exist for now.
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