I am looking to basically just transition to a small time, forever on, server to support my growing Plex footprint. I don’t need anything top of the line, and I’ve already crimped my lines to the room.
What’s the most cost effective way to go about this? Figured i would come to the pros.
Thanks!
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Personally I would do this
Find an old laptop, desktop, any computer
Put proxmox on it. It’s free and lightweight
Create a Plex LXC. Also free and lightweight. There are community scripts to do this.
You should get pretty good performance on Plex, you can manage the computer through a web browser and it only costs you whatever the cost of finding some hardware to put it on is
Going with a cheap used system, and then adding an Intel a310 is a good start. For getting drives, look into getting some external Seagate drives, popping them open, and using them internally. Just a couple ideas 😊
Kodi. So much better than Plex or Jellyfin. Not even in the same category. It just takes more work to setup and customize because it’s so much more powerful. I recommend compiling from source, b/c repos can be old and flatpak is bloated.
The comments aren’t doing a great job of explaining this but Plex can run on virtually any reasonably modern hardware: old laptops, thin clients, an old desktop, scrap parts. If you can get linux running on it, you can run plex for local network usage with one or two users.
Where hardware starts to matter is if you need to expose it to lots of simultaneous users or you need to do lots of transcoding. I do know of some users with giant libraries where the libraries can be a little slow to browse but it can be helped with a cache SSD for the metadata.
At this point the iGPU on intel processors is the easiest way to do transcoding and can handle a lot of streams with hardware transcoding. I used to have a nvidia card in my box and realized the iGPU was actually better anyway. I also think your streams should be direct play as much as possible. It’s much easier and more efficient to have your library on a flexible format to start and just avoid on demand trsnscode.
If you need external access and need a VPN, you need a little extra power - or a separate device.
Now, OP didn’t ask but I’ll give my two cents on Plex vs Jellyfin.
Objectively, Plex is still the easiest to set and forget and is the most feature rich. I used it for something close to 15 years. I finally dropped it when I couldn’t watch live tv anymore because of a known bug they just refused to fix for over a year. That was the last straw for me on top of all the enshittification.
I tried Jellyfin and found it lacking features and it was more difficult to manage securely. That led me to Emby. I’m not sure why it never comes up in these discussions. It’s a nice middle ground. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby from when Emby decided to go closed source to try to figure out a sustainable financial model so they’re very similar but Emby gives you back some of the convenience features from Plex.
But ultimately I think this is a personal preference and none of these are one size fits all. Plex is a reasonable place to start but, in my opinion, Emby is worth a look. Jellyfin is the ultimate choice for open-source, personal control, and privacy that the other two can’t match because of their financial models.
As someone who’s used all three (moved from Plex -> Emby -> Jellyfin):
Plex’s killer feature is the relay and the fact it’s completely transparent for users. You log in with a Plex client (whatever device, whatever location in the world) and it will sort out a connection to the Plex server. Complete no-brainer.
Jellyfin has been killing it lately, the last 3 versions (10, 11, 12) were all amazing leaps forward. The devs have been really hitting their stride and are addressing fundamental design issues and making Jellyfin better from the ground up. If you want complete independence, openness and control, excellent performance, this is it.
Emby for me sits somewhere in-between and it’s not necessarily the better off for it. Feels like a compromise or the worst of both worlds. It has touches of Plex’s enshittification streak, it hasn’t addressed any of the core problems like Jellyfin has.
Both Emby and Plex have issues navigating VPNs and complex/unusual network setups because their plug’n’play approach relies too heavily on autodetection. Plex has the relay to fall back on (provided you pay for it) but Emby doesn’t.
Both Emby and Plex will move features around and really, really want you to keep paying so it’s anybody’s guess what you’ll be paying for from month to month. Lifetime passes were (can I say it?) a tremendously STUPID idea and now that ship has sailed anyway.
IMHO, one of these days someone will come up with a way for Jellyfin to provide free, transparent, aecure client+server pairing behind NAT and that will be a huge blow to both Plex and Emby.
I cannot vouch for this because I literally just found it two posts down after reading this one, but the developer of the JellyBox music player has a relay plugin for Jellyfin. It seems to specifically exist for the music player, but that’s still useful for some people: https://github.com/JellyBoxPlayer/jellyfin-relay
The circlejerk of “Plex bad get JellyFin” always happens here.
JellyFin doesn’t have as many features and if you want to access your library away from home safely it is more complicated to setup.
I love PlexAmp. It has really reintroduced me to so much of my library I forgot I had.
Depending where you live you can find reasonably priced workstations on https://www.govdeals.com/ that can handle being nothing but a media server.
The circlejerk of “Plex bad get JellyFin” always happens here.
Yeah, it’s a sad debate since Kodi is far better than either.
Fine I will jump in: I am not sure trusting Plex to get access to your home environment is any safer. They have had security issues lately.
But either way, lock down what plex or jellyfin can do in the container is the best way to start.
Plex is easier to just blindly let a corporation (that isnt doing too well) authorize all your users and let them in the open port. I will give you that.
Jellyfin may have less features? I have no idea. I have had both for a very long time, and always go to Jellyfin first. It is snappier, I like the layout better, and it gets the job done.
In terms of features, Jellyfin has watch together. Plex just took that ability away. They also seem determined to make their interface suck.
As far as plexamp goes, I still vastly prefer Clementine on the desktop, but on a mobile device it works ok. I don’t like the way it shows my albums, I don’t like the way it makes finding anything a lot more difficult. But it does let you set a radio station and does a good job of mixing up what you have.
Clementine
Whoa, has Clementine picked up again? I’ve long ago switched to Strawberry and then to Fooyin.
It never really went away. Just slowed down. Latest release was yesterday!
Strawberry is STILL missing too many features that Clementine has.
Never tried Fooyin. I will give it a try.
Edit: I am confused by why such a feature rich applications defaults make me have change to radio, or visualization, or mood bar. I bet I can set all those things, but why isnt there a give my the whole view at once choice? I assume there are shared layouts somewhere to import?
Avoiding Plex for something like Jellyfin is a start.
Past that, it doesn’t take a lot to run such a service unless it needs transcoding which is where it gets dicey for realtime streaming.
If you have a standard expected output you might get away with bulk stranscoding ahead of time and then run things on some little nuc or an old laptop.
There was nothing in the question about jellyfin.
I’m on the jellyfin side, but you people have to chill, this is becoming Ford vs Chevy in here.
It’s not so much a question of one vs another. It was asked the most cost effective way to accomplish such.
Last I knew Plex required an ongoing subscription for some aspects that Jelly has for free, so that consideration is part of cost effectiveness.
Personally I have Emby simply out of inertia since I bought a lifetime licence before there was a Jellyfin spun off, but didn’t propose that because it would be an unneeded cost.
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Got an old laptop? I recommend that. Put linux on it.
This. Plex doesnt need a lot of resources, I ran it from a raspberry pi 3 for years without issue.
If you want it to transcode stuff it might need some. I run it on an old laptop that has a 1050m in it.
Can I chime in without sounding anti-Plex? Nothing specifically against it, but they’re kind of going bad. Jellyfin is a lot more private and better to host for data control/privacy.
Don’t get me wrong, Plex of easy to setup, configure, share, etc. with a lot of robust features, but their private equity or venture capitalist money has them selling/sharing data and are cutting out jobs to save money, etc.
JF gives you the freedom Plex once did before its corruption. I’ve been on Plex 12+years and switched about a year ago.
Can I chime in without sounding anti-Plex?
There’s nothing wrong with being opposed to enshitified proprietary apps.
See, I hadn’t even heard that. Is JF on anything like Apple TV (like Plex) or would i have to figure out the streaming part?
It’s pretty much everywhere Plex is. The main issue is that it’s trickier to set up for sharing outside your LAN.
I would never be doing that, so I’m sold on it then. It’s basically just my backup movie/TV hub for my LAN.
Definitely suggested then, you’re also going to get drastically more features. If you remember a time when Plex plugins were available - its that. And more flexible.
Any intel-based chipset past 6th gen or so will be ok, 7+ recommended, 10th+ for AV1. If you aren’t doing any transcoding, just about anything will work include a pi.
I’ve ran Jellyfin as an app on a used Dell Optiplex 7060 micro running TrueNAS for a while with zero issues. You can get them for less than $200 on eBay.
Does TailScale make this easier or nah?
Very easy server-wise. But you may neeed to help your family member/friend with the initial set up on the client, if they are not so tech-savy.
A big PSA here is to have them pass you the device activation link that pops up when they first start Tailscale, and activate their device on your tailnet.
Then you tag it, write an ACL rule for it (or you probably already have a rule for Jellyfin clients connecting only to the Jellyfin server on your tailnet by now, so just the tagging is enough) and that’s it.
MUCH simpler than having non-savvy people attempt to set up a Tailscale user account. Plus, you can only have 6 users in a free tailnet but you can have 100 devices.
From my limited testing of tailscale a while back, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work. Saw no reason to switch from my wireguard setup.
Can confirm it works. I have jf over tailscale.
I use my own domain but could be done using tailscale urls if you dont want to deal with certificates, split horizon dns, etc.
The Jellyfin clients for Apple TV are not very good in my opinion and use case. Thankfully there are a lot more than there used to be 6 months ago. But, at least for me, they are lacking in features. I keep trying to them every so often hoping they have improved so I can finally make thr switch.
On the Apple tv just use infuse. Sure it sucks paying for an app, but it works.
Glad it works for you, but it is missing live tv, which is the biggest thing all the Jellyfin apps either do poorly or don’t do at all. I went through all 19 ish apps I could find a few weeks ago and none of them checked off all my boxes. But I will keep looking and hoping.
It’s basically a web server to play media on the front end and a metadata manager and conversion engine on the back.
Pretty well the same as Plex but there’s less reliance on external services, more truly self contained and less subscription. There are client apps for most streaming boxes that I know of.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
I tried to move to Jellyfin…but it wasn’t capable of scanning my library… either too big or too many different video types…but it has never been able to complete.
Quick google search says this is a known issue, so I abandoned it.
Jellyfin 12 supposedly fixed or at least improved the performance issues when scanning large libraries so might be worth another try.
How big is your library? Mine is close to 10TB with files of all sizes and types and I don’t have an issue.
Um… Refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it may incriminate me… ;-)
Seriously though, I think when you add movies and TV shows together, close to 70TB? (All with disc backups of course)
The introduction of UHD has caused the libraries to explode in size…
I’m at close to 150TB, with a lot of my movies being 30GB+. Most are DVDs at full uncompressed, and BD rips in h.265. I’ve also still got my LG BD-ROM that I’ve ripped all my UHD discs on, and those are often over 40GB.
Maybe there was an incompatibility or glitch last time. I’d try it again just in case! Could be a software bug, too. I’ve got an Intel 12900HX in my server. I know AMD are sometimes not as compatible.
yeah, I was running in a container with an RTX3050 backing it for transcoding, but it never really got to that point… I’ve debated a dedicated plex server, using NFS to pull from my TrueNAS… but I already have 5 servers running in my environment…my electric bill isn’t very friendly… ;-)
This was only a couple of months ago… I’ll try it again at some point…but I bought the Plex Pass back when it was like $49 for life… so I’m not hurting for anything. ;-)
Same! Plex pass <100. I’m on a 12900HX now which does well for all h.265 content. The difference is I’m bare metal vs Docker or VM. I’ve got 3 micro PCs all running various things, a couple pis, etc. I like virtualization, but I like separating stuff out to not over utilize, nor worry about 1 system crash taking it all down.
Maybe try adding the files in 10 TB batches or something. My library is approaching that size, and no issues here. Could be tripping up on a specific file or something. I know Jellyfin can be a little particular about folder hierarchy and naming conventions, too.
Watching logs, looks like it’s haning up on specific encoding types…
I’m using a prebuilt docker container that I assume must have come with all the appropriate codecs lined up. If you spun up your own container or installed it directly on your host OS, you may be missing some, I suppose. Without seeing the logs I couldn’t tell you more (not that I’m some kind of self-hosting master, myself), but that seems like a pretty good lead.
Google gets tons of stuff wrong now it has AI. Did you confirm it was a known issue listed on the Jellyfin support site?
Do you have any old/spare hardware you can use?
An old laptop or get hold of a Dell Optiplex with at least 7th gen Intel.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LXC Linux Containers NAT Network Address Translation NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #157 for this comm, first seen 3rd Nov 2026, 00:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I haven’t used Plex in a while, but I presume it would go similarly to my Jellyfin migration this year.
I pulled out a 10 year old laptop from my pile of scrap, installed a light-weight Linux server that can run containers, and I’ve been running LinuxServer.io’s Jellyfin container on it. Updates are pretty easy and I don’t have to worry about cluttering the host box’s packages with dependencies that may or may not conflict with the other things I run in it.
If you have the time to figure out how to run apps in containers, I highly recommend doing so. There’s a lot of documentation for Docker, and Docker Compose files make managing the containers pretty easy.
I got a used thinkpad x1 carbon for under 200 a year ago from a used electronics store in my area. It’s running Debian and the YAMS stack, I found it easiest for me to get running as a docker noob
Jellyfin is the way. It’s not that complex to set it up either.
RasPi and external storage.
