this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I recently set up a Plex server on a machine I was given that I also run my home assistant server on.
The machine crashes every few weeks and it is me thinking really hard about getting something else to use. I’d love to use a Pi, but have yet to find one at anything close to MSRP, so I’m eyeing different netbooks that I can run Linux on.
The rest of my home theater is just about where I want it for now (Onkyo TX-NR5100, Klipsch Reference all around with the 820f’s for my mains, r-32c center channel, r-52 bookshelves for my rears, r-120sw, and r-41sa for upward firing atmos which I’m not thrilled with and want to switch to in-ceiling speakers) and fills my small media room very, very well. But I see another few thousand dollars, at least, in my future here.
Switch out Plex for jellyfin
Why?
I admit I don’t know anything about jellyfin but Plex was dead simple to set up.
It's open source and gives you a lot of fantastic features that are locked behind paywalls and more on plex. But I will be honest it's not nearly as simple and setting it up so I could use it outside of my home network took a week of figuring out issues with proxies.
You can keep using plex but if you have a good tech understanding jellyfin is pretty nice.
For your computer troubles I would say you can skip the pi completely if you have the space and get something like a cheap optiplex. They are dirt cheap used and can give more oomph and customization for hardware later on and are really simple to get any Linux distro on.
It's free and just as easy. You miss a few plex only features but they're not worth their money. Although I did get a lifetime license for 75$. Otherwise plex is too expensive if it's the monthly sub for the pass. Feature wise, but thats probably personal.
So far I haven’t found the Plex pass to be necessary for me at all. I torrent my media and that’s it. I have Apple Music for my music, which allows for lossless downloads, I don’t care about skipping credits, and love tv doesn’t matter to me at all. Since the free tier with Plex serves my needs well, I’m not sure why I should look at Jellyfin when by all accounts it’s more difficult to use and I’d have to make my friends switch to a new means of accessing my library.
Open source so not bound by some companies' rules, regular updates. Jellyfin was created in response to the nth "fuck you" from plex to its userbase.
I don't know if Plex supports this feature but I'm running Jellyfin on a RPi 4B and Jellyfin support live transcoding for video formats that are not natively supported by the streaming client. Although RPi 4B supports hardware encoding of h264 1080p30, it performs badly.
So if you're using live transcoding maybe opt for hardware with more oomph.
I’m just torrenting media that’s hard to get, namely now that I’m cutting subscriptions more and more, nothing terribly special. I honestly don’t even know what I’d need live transcoding for lol.
Generally for bigger transcoding jobs you need a legit graphics card however just modern CPUs with internal graphics can do a lot even if they are a bit slower.