Building a home media server on a budget
Hi
I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.
I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).
So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.
I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.
I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.
Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.
I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.
All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.
Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.
Oh hell yeah! One of my favorite topics :)
First of all, it seems like you have a lot of the important requirements in mind already, which is great. Just to reiterate:
And finally, just in case this is useful, here are the server setups I've used:
My first home media server was an Intel NUC with a small 80GB internal HDD and a larger 4TB external HDD, just connected with an external HDD enclosure over USB. I was running Debian (a Linux distro) at the time, and manually maintaining my installed software, which I think was basically just Plex and Nextcloud. Honestly this worked totally fine for the 720p and 1080p content I was watching at the time, but it wasn't the most reliable. The server would crash periodically, and updates were always somewhat nerve-wracking.
At some point I moved to a prebuilt, used Dell R710, which is a rack server. That thing was unbelievably loud and probably not the most power efficient (I didn't even really try to investigate its power usage at the time haha), BUT it was nice to have HDD drawers on the front for installing new drives, and it was also really nice to have a computer that was pretty inexpensive with a bunch of RAM and CPU cores that I didn't have to do the work of building myself. There are newer rack servers that you can get for pretty cheap now that have better power and performance characteristics than this one, but I would only consider this route if you have a basement that you can throw this in, because rack servers tend to be quite loud. This thing also had a very very old Intel Xeon CPU (old server CPU architecture) with like 24 cores or something like that, and the performance was truly totally fine.
Now I have a custom built server that's a tower form factor with a newer Intel CPU and an m.2 slot for an SSD, because I have a 4k TV now and wanted 4k content, and so I really needed Quick Sync! Happy to talk more about this build, but this was my "I've been doing this for a decade let's finally splurge" build, so it's definitely not within the budget that you expressed haha. I also run a ton of services on this server now, and it has far outgrown the original "home media server" use case.
Thanks for your help, this is great and I'll definitely be looking at that Wikipedia page!
Hopefully if I've got any burning questions you wouldn't mind me PM'ing you since it seems like you've got a wealth of knowledge?
Absolutely, reach out any time!
I'd highly recommend the cheap HP S01 or HP 290 for a Celeron processor that can handle 21~ 1080p transcodes. I got one that to run plex/jellyfin and another that runs a tdarr instance to transcode old media library to h265 because it can reduce disk utilization of videos though it better to just download it that way.
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-owners-thread/2829
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-s01-pf1013w-owners-thread-and-review/9070
Those machines look pretty slick and I can get a refurb for around £95-105 which is exactly what I'd be looking for in regards to my budget. I'll have a look at those forum threads once I finish work later, thanks!
Hardware encoders might not be necessary since OP does not intend to stream outside their house. Transcoding DVD and Blu-Ray quality video can get you good bitrates with better quality if you do so ahead of time with a good software encoder like Handbrake, rather than at the time of consumption with a real time hardware encoder.
My average blu ray movie rip is between 3 and 10 GB, highly dependent on visual characteristics of the production itself (camera type, film stock, shooting style, etc). Less discerning viewers can keep them consistently under 4 GB and be pretty happy.
That's true! They had mentioned that their daughter might want to stream from an iPad while away from the house, though, so I was taking that use case into consideration (especially since I expect that use case will only grow as their daughter does!). Streaming on a mobile device over WiFi or cellular data is most likely going to lead to some on-the-fly transcoding!
Recommending features for projects like this is a balancing act, though; if you don't include enough room to grow, you might immediately find use cases that you can't support as soon as you actually have the system set up, but if you establish too many requirements up front, the project gets more complex and expensive! In this case, given how widely available Intel CPUs with Quick Sync are, I think leaning toward future proofing is the right move, but I also don't think it's so crucial that it should be a hard requirement of the system.
You're right, I'd like to ensure the system is future-proofed to an extent. My daughter is still very young at the moment, only just starting to watch videos on her tablet but by the time she's 4 or 5 I imagine she'll be utilising it on almost every long car journey or holiday we're on. While me and my partner don't stream much content outside the house, that's not to say we absolutely never do either.
At this point the question is more of a matter of what hardware features you absolutely need. For instance, one can easily get away with no hardware transcoding if you are ok with not encoding to newer codecs to begin with or if you are going to be exclusively using newer devices that are capable of playing the newer ones. And at that point you can go with a minimal system; a raspberry pi and an external hard drive. That will surely be under your budget.
Otherwise, start with literally any junk PC. At this point it will be hard to find something that won’t be up to the task without specifically looking for something older than a decade.
If you want to do live transcoding, I believe some intel integrated graphics chips have basic hardware transcoding. The general consensus is that nvidia has the best quality, though. It changes a bit all the time so it might be worth doing a little bit of research if quality is important to you.
Consumer hard drives have relatively high failure rates so you should invest in server grade units or in SSDs.
software is going to be the next question, and there are tons of options. In a previous life I would have set up a Linux box manually, but these days it’s pretty easy to just set up Jellyfin or something similar. If you are going to use this as a local playback device you may also want to install something like Kodi.
I completely agree with this advice. It doesn't sound like there's much need for hardware transcoding if the only thing they might watch off of the LAN is a few cartoons for a kid — they could just get lower bitrate versions or transcode them ahead of time.
Just getting the biggest external hard drive that fits in the budget and plugging it into basically any computer that you don't mind leaving on all the time is a pretty good approach. An old laptop would work great too — probably relatively power efficient and you get to use the battery like a bootleg UPS. If it's got an Intel CPU there's a decent chance you'd get H.264 hardware encode anyway, even though that probably doesn't really matter too much.
My plan was to keep things simple, rip DVDs into mp4 h.264, music and podcasts into mp3. Hopefully that'll avoid files having to be live transcoded streaming from the server to say the TV or a tablet or phone.
By junk PC do you mean just something like an older 2nd hand or refurbed enterprise PC? I've seen people recommend HP Z420's, Elitedesk 800 G3's or a Dell Prescision 5810 as a good starting point but I just don't have the knowledge base to know one way or the other.
So I wasn't sure whether getting server grade HDDs was definitely necessary so that's good to know.
Again, sorry if this sounds stupid, jellyfin is just for media so I'd still need to install Linux or Windows and then install jellyfin on top of this, is that right?
No matter what, you will need an operating system. Linux is the more reliable option compared to Windows, and BSD may be a bit better in some ways but it’s generally going to be harder to deal with than the popular Linux distros. I know there are Linux distros out there made specifically for this kind of use case scenarios which might even have most or all of the software you need preinstalled with good defaults. In any case, when dealing with any of the software aspects, it’s a very good idea to read the documentation.
I haven’t looked up the specs for those computer models, but they are probably going to be fine. Intel is on, what, their 14th generation of Core 2 chips? While I probably wouldn’t get a computer with the very early ones, something like te 5th generation and on will be fine (which will be written out as i7-5nnn or something like that. If you do opt for the older generations you might want to avoid the i3s and other low end ones. For AMD, any Ryzen chips will work fine, though maybe skip the first generation). Things like ram and graphics cards can be added if they don’t have any or enough.
A M1 Mac mini with some type of external storage. If budget is not a problem.(idk how much they cost in Europe)
Other wise a NVIDIA shield is cheaper and still pretty good from what I have read, but haven’t use that one.
Getting an old pc or server might be cheaper at the beginning but they use more power on average. Maybe you can find an arm base server but I haven’t seen many of those.
M1 Mac mini is actually a really good recommendation, now that I think about it. Apples hardware transcoder is pretty good, and the chip absolutely sips power. The only thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t use internal hard drives.
Yeah their non upgradeability is problematic, but you can get something like OWC miniStack, which makes it look really nice. Or just run a long thunderbolt cable to a hidden external drive like I do and save yourself the money.
The M1 handles 4K like it’s nothing, and the new M2 ones are apparently even better.
This is what I've seen people say, that getting an older PC might be cheaper initially but they'll probably idle at a higher wattage and electricity isn't cheap in the UK at the moment!
I've seen people mentioning Intel i3's and i5's as well as people saying they're overkill and a mobile chip would probably be enough. Then people saying to avoid AMD and others saying using AMD is fine as long as you're not transcoding to multiple devices at the same time.
Its such a minefield of information and don't even get me started on YouTube, it's mostly techbros setting up home servers for £50 or £1000, all clickbaity and rarely actually helpful.
Time for me to pay it forward!
A few months ago I had a similar journey myself. Though I had already settled on the hardware, I was uncertain on what operating system to use with my device so I sought help here and I got some very useful advice that I ended up acting upon.
What I ended up with aligns nicely with what you're looking for. Before going on about my system in detail though, I'd still like to point out a few things, because not every use case is exactly similar.
So my use cases lead me to this. At first I was hesitant because, i3, only 2 cores? Yuck. How's that gonna be any different than just getting a Synology? Well, turns out, Intel has this great technology called Quick Sync Video. If you have a relatively new Intel CPU, which the NUC I chose certainly had, it makes transcoding a breeze. (Including 4K content.) And because it's a low power CPU, it's energy efficient and has no fans.
As for the drives, as I mentioned, I wanted to make use of my external USB drives. I know they're not ideal, but I didn't want to throw away 16 TBs worth of drives that were working perfectly well. Remember, if one of them, or all of them dies on me, I wouldn't shed a tear. So when my NUC arrived, I hooked it up a powered USB hub and to the hub I hooked up my drives. I installed Unraid, as per the advice I got here, and it was as painless as an installation would be. Unraid is a Linux based operating system, but that shouldn't scare you in the slightest. I do have some Linux experience but I didn't need to employ it at all. I didn't even have to look at any documentation. It was as simple as reading what was in front of me and clicking on a few buttons.
I was done with everything in about 3 hours, starting from unboxing the NUC to watching my first film on my TV.
I've been using it for the past few months and I've not had a single issue yet. If it weren't for a couple of power outages, the system would've had a 100% uptime. So far, I've only used Plex and Plex adjacent Docker containers such as Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr and qBittorrent. The only containers I've been running that's not related to Plex (hence streaming) are Duplicacy for backups (not for my media files but for my Docker container configs, which is roughly around 5 GBs stored on my OneDrive) and Tailscale. I do not do any port forwarding. You cannot reach the NUC unless you're on my Tailscale network, which I believe to be the safest option.
If I were in your position, I'd probably go with the route that I described. However, some things you have to be mindful of:
I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Good luck!
Thanks, this is all very helpful! Great as well that it seems like what I'm looking for is exactly what you were looking for and now have so I'll read through your Tildes topic later tonight when I've got a chance and start compiling information.
Sadly I've no drives that can be used so I'd have to buy drives which will be the majority of my budget which limits funds for other parts of the build but I'm sure I can get something that'll work.
If I've any questions I'll ping you a PM if that's alright?
My pleasure!
I think whatever you do with the drives (SATA or USB), you can just get a 4 TB drive and when you fill it up, you can get some other one down the road. You don't have to have a parity drive of any kind. So don't invest in hard drives upfront. Get something you can get by, even if it's 2 TBs. (Again, assuming you don't just view 4K content.)
You would need a cache drive though, but you can just get the cheapest one you can find. You don't need a TB NVMe or something like that. I have a 512 GB cache drive and it's very much an overkill. (I only use 20 GB of that as of right now and that's just config files.) A 250 GB NVMe drive like this one would be more than fine. Unraid runs on a USB stick, at least boots from it, so you don't need a big boot drive, if you will. Even if you don't end up using Unraid and go with a more traditional OS like Debian, Ubuntu, or even Windows, 250 GB NVMe would be enough as a boot and system drive. RAM is similarly cheap.
What I'd suggest you do is, spend as less money as possible on things you can change/upgrade down the road. So that's your drives (USB/SATA and cache/boot) and RAM. Just try to get the best NUC you can get within your budget. I'd leave about $150 for them, and have about $250 for the NUC. If you can stretch your budget even a bit more, it'd be great. It'd also be great if you can score a used one on the cheap, but that depends on your location and luck. If you get really lucky, you can even score a NUC that includes an SSD and RAM. Don't be afraid of looking for a used one. They're sturdy little devices. It's hard to damage them.
Of course, anytime!
If you're looking for HDD for storage. I've found that sites like diskprices.com is handy when comparing the cost of the bare drive compared to buying and external one and "shucking" it (there's also plenty of resources online on how to do this for popular Seagate and Western Digital external drives)
There is another one that is more US focused but as you've listed everything in £ so far I figured this one with the amazon.co.uk option would be more helpful. While the site won't show the prices everywhere it's good for a general guide to then shop around.
I'd also add another endorcement for Unraid. I've been using it for a few years now for the same purpose that you've listed, a couple of minor hiccuops (which were all my fault, I broke something).
Lots of people have already talked about hardware, so I'll talk about getting all your content from physical media onto your NAS.
Home video formats have been encrypted ever since DVD, and you will need software that can decrypt them. For DVD itself, this has been trivial for close to 20 years now, and encoders like Handbrake can handle them natively, which I'll get to later.
Blu-Ray is more complicated, and you will need some specialized software. There are lots of options, but the best by far is MakeMKV. It's $50 USD, but essentially free "while in beta" as long as you grab the latest beta key from their forum. Alternatives like AnyDVD HD are both more expensive, and allegedly get their VKs from MakeMKV anyways.
With MakeMKV, you will be ripping the original quality video straight from the disc to an MKV file on your hard drive. This file will be between 20 and 45 GB (fro 1080p movies) or close to 100 GB for 4k movies.
I don't bother transcoding my 4k movies as they are already pretty efficiently compressed, but you probably will want to transcode your standard def DVD and 1080p blu-ray movies as you can significantly reduce the amount of space they take up on your NAS with a minimal loss in quality.
For this, the easiest tool to use is Handbrake. For the absolute best compatibility with playback devices, you will want to stick with the x264 encoder. However, hardware support for h.265 has become ubiquitous in the last 8 years and you are probably safe going with x265 using the main10 profile. For audio, if you want to preserve things like Dolby Atmos then you will want to configure Handbrake to just pass that through to the output file. Otherwise, I would encode to AAC with a bitrate of 64kbps per channel (that is 384kbps for 5.1 surround sound).
This is an insanely deep rabbit hole and I've only scratched the surface. If you intend to rip a lot of DVDs, I have more advice on how to get the best picture quality out of them. It's not as straightforward as you think, since DVD's video formats were designed for a world where people only had interlaced analog displays.
I absolutely love h.265 and AV1 quality and low bitrates, but man, the costs of encoding them without dedicated hardware for it is crazy. I had some HD resolution videos that I wanted to transcode and AV1 was giving me something like 0.06FPS and it made my laptop get very hot. I stopped it after a few hours and used Apple's Video Toolkit h.265 encoder which uses apple silicon acceleration, and it gave me results that averaged about 500FPS, which finished the video in about a minute or so.
I'd be curious to what your DVD settings are. One of my "maybe eventually" projects is to digitize my husband's gargantuan collection of them.
Granted I do this on an M2 Macbook Pro and a desktop with a Ryzen 5900x, but I find I generally get just 5-10 FPS below "real time" with h.265 at my typical quality setting on the "slow" preset, with x265.
AV1 is still so slow as to not be worth using for my use case, and I don't care too much since only two devices in my house have hardware decoders for it anyways.
TL;DR: I don't have time right now but can give some directions/advice later if nobody else does in the meantime.
I run i5-4670 (or whatever) with 8GB RAM and 3x 4TB in software RAID5 and GTX750 for HW on-the-fly encoding. I run Gentoo Linux on it and Jellyfin as my media server and I use this PC as a home directory for al the users too.
With your budget, you will do great, especially if you get your hands on some second hand stuff which is still perfectly fine for what you need (except storage, buy that new).
I will be back in a few hours and may elaborate more.
EDIT: Posted my comment a bit lower
sound advice, but I've personally recently bought some refurbished enterprise HDDs (server pulls) and am looking forward to see how that goes. New is safest, but there are reasonable ways of buying used.
It also depends on the RAID setup. If you're not buying HDDs from a single batch, which you should never do in the first place, buying secondhand enterprise refurbs will probably last you a long time and give you the redundancy to change without issue should one break.
There certainly are, but I can't just go and say that used storage is good. If you know what you are buying and how to test, it might be.
I'm glad I've got enough of a budget to get what I need. I'd definitely appreciate further guidance and help if you're able, thanks again!
Let me start with stating that I have read only your original post and actually no replies. This is because I'm very lazy and I have other things to do (that I constructed for myself so I don't have to read them) :-D Another reason is I'm eager to reply! I will read them later.
After this "disclaimer" I will try to write about my way of doing home server and what I believe it should have and what is not that much needed. It will be long read.
I have built my first home server in 2013 based on Gigabyte C1037UN-EU motherboard which has full fledged Celeron CPU from notebook that actually had some oomph back in the day. I have bought two 3TB HDDs and put them in RAID1 (mirror, the same things on both drives, total capacity of this RAID was 3TB). I used this PC as my DLNA server back in the day and also as home folder. I use Linux, the whole /home was on this server (meaning really just the OS was on my desktop).
After 9 years of uneventful 24/7 run (except some restarts due to updates and some electricity outages) I decided I have to replace harddrives - just as a precaution.
At that time I had my friends old PC lying around equipped with i5-4670 (or whatever). I decided I will switch the board too and get higher performing machine (at the cost of higher power consumption). I bought 3x 4TB HDDs and hooked them up in RAID5 with adding more in the future if higher capacity was needed. I build my own case for it too as I didn't want to spend money on new one :-D You can see the birth of this NAS in my imgur post
I started ripping my DVDs and Blu rays at this time with MakeMKV that I eventually bought license for (as I have ripped over 200 discs over time and considered the software worthy). I have also watched Jeff Geerling's video on Jellyfin by that time and started experimenting with Plex and Jellyfin. Both of them had some pros and cons, I will try to summarize here:
As both had some drawbacks, it was Plex not starting automatically that had the last word. I'm glad I picked Jellyfin as my server. I like the open source idea even though it is not that streamlined experience.
I have added my old GTX 750 into the server to help with transcoding as I couldn't get Intel's Quicksync to do the hardware encoding. The card basically doesn't add power consumption when it does nothing and a few watts when it transcodes. Being this old it can only do H264, which is ok with me as I run 576p and 1080p resolutions and H265 isn't that much better in such lowres (to my knowledge, at least). I do not remember power consumption, but I believe it to be around 50W idle from the wall, CPU can eat up additional say 70W when fully loaded while GPU adds around 5W when trancoding meaning 125W at full load (which doesn't happen unless I personally load the machine up).
I run Gentoo Linux on this server and it is run headless (no GUI, no video output). I picked Gentoo because I'm familiar with it. Arch would be better, but still a bit hard for newcomer. Ubuntu is kinda easy on user knowledge but also unnecessarily heavy on HW (eating up resources just like Windows). Other distribution I have no experience with.
I would probably recommend Arch Linux but you would have to find someone who would help you set it up ( I can't be of use here, I can help with other specific Linux things though). Arch will teach you Linux basics and a bit of advanced very quickly! Also Arch wiki is the best Linux resource out there and things from there could be applied in other distros as well. Be ready to screw up sooner or later and you may want to reinstall the OS a few times before you set it up the right way - this is for every Linux distro if you are not familiar with Linux at all, actually, not specific for Arch.
I also set up third server, this one is not at my home. It sits at my friends flat and is connected to the internet through public IP meaning I can access it directly from anywhere. I didn't port forward Jellyfin's port, rather set up OpenVPN and I access Jellyfin through that VPN. This server has i3-3xxx (2c/4t at 3.4GHz max), 8GB RAM and GTX 1050 for trancoding (should have H265 support, haven't tested it). It also has just one 6TB drive for Jellyfin's library (and SSD for OS). It draws around 20-25W idle from the wall spiking up to 60W when fully loaded (ie. transcoding 1080p movie using up 100% CPU and using GPU for hardware acceleration of the process).
Having all this experience I would personally get a used motheboard with any i3 CPU modern enough (for your budget, say you wanted at the very least 3rd generation like me, more modern would be much better), 8GB of RAM would be plenty, PCIe slot for a used GTX 1050 for HW accelerated transcoding (2GB variant would be ok too, non-Ti is perfectly fine, you can get a card without the need of external power - powered only from PCIe slot, depends on the precise card though) and some HDD(s) for content and SSD for system. As I said previously, I would buy new drives. You can get used ones that are perfectly fine but as we say here - you would be buying a rabbit in a bag (paying for something not actually knowing what/how good it is). But given that my HDDs run for 9 years straight and are still fine... It is just a precaution to buy new ones.
Buy 80Plus Gold power supply (or higher if you want - it will be long time investment, I still run off of my 11 years old Seasonic) to have that extra efficiency, especially with modern PSUs. Your server will very likely run the PSU only onfraction of rated load, very likely only 5-10% and the efficiency goes down fast when you don't have good 80Plus Gold (or better) PSU. Maybe have a look for one that doesn't spin the fan until it hits specific power output (I have one Seasonic Focus SGX-550, I believe, that has this feature). Don't cheap out on it.
You could probably get some older workstation or desktop (like Dell, HP or other) for next to nothing. Be warned though that these very likely have proprietary motherboards and power supplies. You'd better get someone's old PC after they upgraded or just some parts of such PC. It doesn't really have to be powerful PC with fast RAM and whatnot... Almost office machine would be good enough if it had standard PSU and motherboard. Think about getting used CPU cooler that may be able to run passively, although have some fan to move air around in the case anyway. Filters are your friends, better run fans on the intake making the case pressurized (so you don't get dust through any small crease anywhere - controlling dust buildup on the filters).
I don't know what to say more right now :-) Kinda exhausted my knowledge (or my brain). If you have ANY questions, feel free to ask! If some of my info conflicts with any other comment, feel free to point it out and I can speak up on it a bit more. I'm ready to help you if you need it.
Oh! If you go with Linux, don't just copy-paste commands from internet. You have to understand them at least a bit before executing (you have unbelievably great power over the system in Linux). Feel free to ask if you want any command analyzed before running it.
Wow! Thanks for this, you've given me a lot to think about here. I reckon I'll take the jump with Linux, I'm a little tech savvy so I reckon with a bit of research I should be able to get something running but if not then I guess I can always fall back on Windows.
I might forgo the GPU for the time being and if I feel that I need one I can always install it at a later date, save me a little bit of money but the rest of your info is being taken on board as I'm looking into this further.
Thanks so much!
You can definitely forgo the GPU. Just get motherboard with PCIe so you can get GPU later if you need one.
You would do better wih Linux as it doesn't really need much resources. My desktop needs around 400MB RAM once I'm past login screen. If I didn't hae graphical interface, this would probably he under 200MB meaning the rest is free for anything else. Also - there is next to none CPU load whrn just sitting doing nothing.
It is a big step for Windows only person. But I can assure you that you can do it. I have tech savvy friend myself, he runs Windows since he got his first PC. Never tried Linux. Until 2013 when we both got our Gigabyte boards (mentiond above) andhe stepped into Linux territory. Since then he got better. Not good, mind you, but he can resolve the problems he come across himself (woth help of internet, of course). The thing is how much dedicated you will be :-) I believe you can do it. It is good to have knowledge of Linux.
If you run Linux, you will likely use filesystem.incompatible with Windows (Ext4?). You would like to have Samba installed and running on your server so you are able to copy files onto it over the LAN from your Windows PC. Just so you know :-)
Thanks for this Pavouk, I'll definitely look into Linux OS, I know people have suggested things like Debian and Ubuntu as well as Unraid or TrueNAS so I'll do some looking over the weekend and figure out what might work best as well as what I'd be comfortable using.
It kinda depends on what you want. Ubuntu and Debian are standard Linux OS while Unraid and TrueNAS are NAS oriented. If you want to use the server only as standard NAS/vide library, they will likely do well for you.
Easiest way woul be to try each for some time, say a week? Or maybe over the weekend if you can out many hous into playing with it. I'm not familiar with Unraid or TrueNAS, but I guess you can install Plex or Jellyfin there using docker of flatpak or something like that - I'm old school, I don't use these.
Personally I would advise against Debian. It is more stable oriented, maybe too much. Sometimes you can't get new package there (comfortably) because it hasn't deemed to be stable/tested enough. Depends if you really need the package though. I use Gentoo which is kinda bleeding edge as is Arch. Arch will helpnyou understand Linux much faster and will help.you get into it more.
But for your usage things like TrueNAS could actualy be plenty enough. You may not even need to run into linux advanced things. I would probably start with that if I were you.
Why not use what you already have?
I have a very simple setup in that I have my gaming desktop that sits in my basement office. It has my two drives for all my games, but then a separate 4Tb drive, as well as an external 4Tb drive for backup. The 4Tb in the machine itself is exclusively used for archival and setup as a shared drive, which is then mapped as a network drive to my laptops, phones and my HTPC in my Den.
With this setup, I can download from any machine in the house directly to the shared drive and stream whatever I want off of it by accessing the folder with the appropriate media. If I want, I can also connect to my home VPN when I'm out and about and not only have adblock via my PiHole, but access my archive.
I've looked into a NAS or having a RAID setup on another machine, but you're correct: it's expensive. For me, I'd rather just use what I have and make everything as simple and painless as possible. No extra hardware needed and my wife can easily understand how everything works in order to download and stream from it herself. This setup has worked great for us for nearing a decade.
I thought about this but I'm already using all of the drive bays and sockets within my current PC as its crammed with games and programs.
I also use it daily for working from home via Citrix so the less I can introduce into the machine that runs the risk of failing or breaking the better since it's not just a gaming machine but a machine that's used for my job as well.
Its also not a energy efficient machine either, I rarely, if ever leave it idling as it eats leccy like it was going out of fashion and the price of electricity in the UK is pretty high at the moment and sadly, going up even higher in January.
While I’ve not used a media server for streaming videos or as a NAS, I use an old laptop I had from 2007 ish to stream Navidrome/Audio, you don’t necessarily need to buy new things if you can reuse an old laptop or device that you may have.
Funnily enough, I'd have had an old PC I could've used but I gave it to my younger brother back in 2021 but he managed to spill a can of coke on it and killed it about two months afterwards.
Other than that I have no old laptops or PCs I can use. My previous laptop nearly blew up when the battery starting overheating and swelling up so that had to be thrown out and I only got another laptop a couple of years ago which is used fairly often.
I recently built my first home server so I might be able to share some information with you. My goal was to automate most of my extremely legal aquiring of movies and shows and I opted for a Sonarr/Radarr/Emby stack of software.
For a media server, old hardware will do. I reused my old pc for it, put it to boot up on receiving power in the BIOS and then attached an IoT power plug to it so I can turn it on from anywhere (yes I know, don't netsec @ me bros, turning something on via network is a fucking a nightmare that's why I did it this way)
The reason why I did this is because an entire PC is gonna use a lot of power over time and that's pricey so I only turn it on when I need it to from the convenience of my phone.
I would recommend running a dedicated GPU for transcoding purposes, but you might be able to get away with an integrated GPU for that. I think AMD make a range of CPUs with pretty decent iGPUs.
I would definitely also recommend running a dedicated OS for data hoarders like TrueNAS or Unraid. The way I heard it described is TrueNAS is more powerful (but free) but more complex to set up and Unraid is simpler but less powerful. I think if you're just doing simple media hosting you should be fine.
Unless you're also looking to automate your piracy you should be fine with getting something like Emby or Jellyfin (if you can tolerate an ugly UI). Former costs, latter is free.
Thanks!
I think being limited by budget I'm trying to cut down on software costs as much as possible. Definitely leaning towards Jellyfin and possibly TrueNAS (although I'm gonna do a bit more of a deep dive over the weekend on this and see if I'd rather go with Unraid).
I actually have a bunch of IoT plugs in my drawer so I could definitely do something similar. Have it turn off during the night and have it so it can be turned on through our phones or even our Google Home devices when we want to use it.
I'm not as well-versed in this subject as I'm sure a lot of other users here are, but I run a small server for similar usage to what you described all on my main pc. Have you considered that route? Not saying it would be better, but it would most likely be cheaper and a good way to start getting more versed with the stuff and figuring out what you might want or need to upgrade to later. If you already have a nice gaming pc, buy yourself like a 2/4/8 TB hard drive and install it there.
I have a 2TB HDD on my main pc that I've set up as a plex server (which is as easy as downloading it from the plex website and selecting which file or drive you want as the server). It's literally just a folder called something like 'serverlibrary' and then another few folders inside it called 'movies' 'shows' and 'music'. Now I can watch my media pretty much anywhere (tv, browser, phone, etc) by just logging in to the plex app. I even downloaded the plexamp app to my phone which lets me listen to my music from anywhere too. Highly recommend it.
Main drawback I can see is that it requires your main pc to be on all the time (at least when you plan on using the server) but you could probably lower the energy impact a bit by tweaking some power settings and setting it to turn off at nights or whatever.
Could be a great way to get your feet wet. Then you'll still be able to use that hdd if/when you eventually upgrade to a full dedicated server.
EDIT: Just saw your reply to the other person who mentioned the same thing about using your current computer as a server, totally understandable! I'll leave this comment up here in case anyone else in a similar boat comes across this post. Good luck!
Seconding this, while it may not be best for everybody I’ve run both a separate server and Plex on my main pc with an external drive, internal ssd, all sorts of combinations—I’ve had multiple transcodes to off-site users going before, did not notice a dip on the PC. So I would recommend at least giving it a shot on your current in-use hardware to start off!
Cheapest route is a MI Stick with Stremio + torrentio
Raspberry Pi 4B + Raspbian + Servarr + qBt. It can be done with an SD card, but may be unreliable (even if you mount /var/logs in RAM or whatever). Small SSD for OS, as big HDD as possible, and off you go.
(edit to add more details now I'm not on my phone any more...)
This is easy. Buy a Vero V and a big USB hard drive for it. Plug the drive into the Vero box and the Vero box into your TV. Then you're pretty much done if you want to be. It'll handle 8k x265 video ad draws next to no power when it's doing nothing. You absolutely cannot get a more cost effective media centre than this thing. The hardware is specced precisely for being a media centre and is more than capable of almost anything you'll want to do.
Vero runs Linux and you can learn to tinker around with that at your leisure if you want, but it's Kodi on top and you can do all your filesharing, downloading and TV playback without ever leaving the comfy and easy to use Kodi environment. OSMC is an open source project and while it is just one guy, there is good support via the forums and Sam is responsive to messages if the forums can't help.
I'm on my third Vero box. One died through no fault of it's own during a house move and the next one I upgraded because I suddenly needed 4K support and my then-old hardware couldn't manage it. I've spent less on three over the last howevermany years than most of the suggestions here would have you spend on a single box, and probably saved the same again in power use.
You don't need a server grade drive, the amount of work it's doing compared to an actual server is laughably tiny. Any cheap disk from a reputable brand will be totally OK. If, as you say, you're not keeping anything important on it, it doesn't matter if it fails in a few years. You'll probably want more storage space by then anyway.