Initial Thoughts
Hello friends!
This is something that's been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I'm also interested in the fact that there's a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google's position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.
Thing is I'd rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they're sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.
Completely wishful thinking setup
I'm not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here's my admittedly wishful thinking of what I'd like for a setup:
- DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it's HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I've heard great things about those.
- Jellyfin, obviously.
- NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
- Intel GPU, as I've heard they're very good at video decoding, but I've not looked into evidence of this.
- Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
- Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.
A few things with this:
- I don't know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD's dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
- God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
- I'd have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it's still something to look out for.
- Cost of hardware.
Wrap up
Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.
What are your recommendations?
Aoostar n100 2 Bay nas is what I'm currently thinking about. Or the same device but rebadged.
Pros: n100 for quicksync. 2 bays of HDD for media storage. Low power at idle. Cheap for a box with all relevant codecs + sata storage. High WAF compared to other HTPCs
Cons: Unknown brand for build quality and bios updates. General Chinese security anxieties. Idle power, while low, is higher than other n100 options. Fan isn't pwm. Personally don't like the aesthetics.