Hi, I am looking to make my first dedicated jellyfin server rather than running it on my desktop, but don’t know what gpu to get. I will have only a few users and want to avoid Nvidia because I will be on linux + foss drivers. Any recommendations?
GPU choice, honestly, is easy as hell right now.
If you have (or will soon have) kernel 6.2 or higher, get an Intel Arc A380.
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150€
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great h.264 & h.265 performance, VMAF scored above 3090 in most cases, especially at lower bitrates. Tests were done at release and drivers have only improved
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literally the cheapest AV1 encoder GPU available
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open source drivers
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less that 100W full load
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small form factor
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That depends on how you intend on importing your Jellyfin media–if you are able to transcode it to a format that Jellyfin can display natively, then you can even run multiple streams on a Raspberry Pi 4 with no issues (as long as your bandwidth can handle it) I am running Jellyfin in Docker on an old HP laptop with an AMD A10-9600P from 2016. Even with no GPU set up, the processor is able to transcode two simultaneous 1080P streams, although I’m intending on transcoding everything into a codec with native support soon
I run my Jellyfin on an HP sff PC and keep all my files are my big NAS. This lets me take advantage of Intel’s Quicksync for my transcoding which seems to be the easiest and best way to transcode. Also much more power efficient than running a standalone GPU.
I run Jellyfin off a RPi4 mounted behind my TV (I got it before the shortage), and also use a NAS with music folders mounted on the Pi
I don’t have a GPU recommendation but have you assessed that you need a discrete GPU?
I have a small mini PC running Ubuntu server with an i7 CPU that supports hardware acceleration for transcoding to HEVC and it does really well with the handful of people using it.
Also, if most of your media is in something H264 (or something most of your clients are compatible with), you might not even need to worry about transcoding. If that is the case, even CPU usage will be very low afaik.
I run my instance on an old i5, it’s able to transcode things at 1080p, when needed. Unless you REALLY need some serious performance, or want to use a very low power CPU for some reason, a GPU really isn’t necessary.
The computer I am running it on has a dual core Athlon 64x2 and no integrated graphics, so I do need a GPU. I ended up going with a 1050ti because I intend to allow some friends on it meaning 4-5 concurrent streams is a possibility and I found one for really cheap on Ebay because the fan was broken. Thank you for the recommendation though, I should have provided more information when I posted this.
I actually love my Nvidia GPU on my 9th gen I7 GTX 1660 super system. It runs Ubuntu without any issues
You can check mini PCs based on Intel alder lake N100. Intel N100 is perfect because it have a low 6 watts TDP, 4 cores / 4 threads (all low energy cores) and Intel UHD GPU (24 CU) with H264/H265 hardware video encode and decode and AV1 hardware decode only (so no av1 encoding). There is a lot of thiny models some with M2 ports and SATA. Some models are also fanless so no noise :) Price is from ~150$ (barebone) to 300$ with 16Go RAM and 1To SSD M2. I saw good prices on aliexpress for them.
For clarification, I do need a discrete gpu as the cpu has no integrated graphics. It is an athelon 64 x2 from 2005. My media is encoded in a variety of codecs but I do have a 3060ti in my desktop I could use to transcode before uploading. I want to host 2+ tb on it and I think transcoding it all would take a while.
