Well I’m just about fed up with streaming bullshit. I currently have a home server that’s just a raspberry pi4 with a bunch of docker containers and it served my light usage well.
But with transcoding on Jellyfin I’ll be needing some more power. And a bunch of storage. So wanting to perhaps build a new little server.
CPU requirements aren’t high at all. Need to transcode maybe 2 concurrent 4K streams, A cheap discrete GPU or a CPU with a decent enough iGPU could handle this. Other applications are basically negligible, like Vaultwarden and PiHole, torrent, using as a general file storage server.
I also recently acquired a mini PC which is plenty powerful, but doesn’t have any way of adding a bunch of drives. So another option is setting up a pure NAS and just using the mini PC as the server. It’s got an i7 10700T and iris 630 iGPU.
I’ve been using Linux and self hosting basic things for years, but I’m pretty new to this level of hardware and little experience with RAID.
Budget: ~$500ish - storage goal: 12+ TB
May I ask: are you sure you need a media center with transcoding? Because it may be totally sufficient for you to access files through a file explorer and play them with VLC/mpv or whatever else. Having a media center is only really useful if you need external access to your media. I set all that stuff up once, then realized i never watch shows/movies on the go. And if I do, i know beforehand and can copy the raw files to the device i plan to watch on.
On my PC direct play is possible 99% of the time.
I also watch a lot on my Apple TV which requires transcoding for some codecs.
But the big thing is my SO who does watch on the go often.