I really want to get into jellyfin streaming, but I am a noob and have not much knowledge about hardware and video tech, and I could need some help! Please apologize if some of my questions seem uninformed.
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My plan is to store my DVDs on an external HDD, I already have some movies stored with makemkv.
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I do not want to spend a lot of money, at least for now. Synology is out of question because of enshittification. But I don’t have 300-500€ to spend on a mini PC, for a project I might abandon.
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What I have is an old Raspberry Pi 3, where I could set up a Jellyfin server on.
From what I gathered, it will be slow AF, but I guess for trying out the technology it should be enough to start? -
I want to stream to mobile devices, for example an Android phone or tablet, or my Hisense TV. I know already there is no Jellyfin app for the TV, but I could imagine setting up another pi as a client for it.
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Now there is another problem: I do not really understand what transcoding is, or if any if my devices support the H265 codec making transcoding unnecessary.
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Can you recommend me a low cost setup, let’s say max. 150€? Would a Pi 4/5 work, or does it need to be a mini PC?
I am not really interested very much in 4k, but if it is possible, why not.
Bonus question: How easy would it be to setup remote streaming so my SO could watch with their android phone from home?
Rpi3 is pretty slow but you’re right it’s ok for testing.
Jellyfin doesn’t pretend to do external access well. Some people put a proxy in front of it, others do something like Tailscale to create a private network over vpn. Then you set up the Tailscale app on your mobile devices and it should activate for specific ip addresses or dns names.
Consider using tinymusicmanager to fix up all of your tv/movie metadata first.
I am just some rando but I think this poster may have meant tinymediamanager as opposed to tinymusicmanager. I use tinymediamanager and it’s great.
These solutions would probably prevent you from using jellyswarm though
Without knowing much about, yes unless all servers are using tailscale. It’s simple to share hosts across tailscale tenants.
That’s getting more technical than what OP is doing though.
Lots of x86 machines are hitting the curb this week because they won’t run Windows 10. One of those with a Linux distro installed will do what you want. Follow the directions in Jellyfin’s documentation and you should be good. Adding your devices to a Tailscale network is the fastest way to be able to access your content outside of your home network. FireTV has a Jellyfin client and can also be added to Tailscale.
You may want to check out https://www.thewebernets.com/ blog posts. I use some of the recommend setups for my movies and most look great, but I do use subtitles which I think he mostly skips in his setups.
Transcoding is taking an already encoded file, e.g. in H.265 and “re-encoding” it to something else, e.g. to H.264.
This is usually done for clients that cannot natively play back the originally encoded files, or for reasons like bandwidth restrictions, subtitles, etc.
In theory you can get around that by originally encoding your DVDs to a format which all of your devices can play natively. Nowadays, on most modern devices you should be good with H.265. Best way would be simply to try: encode, copy over, play.
H.264 is supported by basically every not ancient device.
Remote streaming inside the same network is as easy as pointing the Android app to the server and logging in.
How do I find out what codec a file has? I guess there is a ffmpeg command to check and also to convert?
Does that mean I can rip all my DVDs to the H.264 format to be sure all devices can play the file? Is there a disadvantage using H.264?
With remote streaming I mean of course streaming outside of my network.
H.264 for DVD content is perfectly fine. H.265 will save a little storage, but that’s basically it.
If you need to go outside your network it will suddenly be a lot more effort. I’d suggest a Wireguard tunnel, but in theory you could also open up the server to the internet. But you better know what you’re doing in that case.
