Faceman🇦🇺

Yea, JF is getting mature enough for more people to transition.

I’ve been running it side by side with Plex for about 2 years now, and have a couple of clients (and all of my personal use) on JF, but a few users either cant run JF directly on their hardware (and don’t want to cast every time) or they are older and would struggle to learn a new app without some hands on practice with it.

The newest Plex UI update on some devices is causing some problems so I think I’ll have a few more users moving to JF in the near future.

It’s a bit of a ram hog compared to plex but that’s not a major issue.

unraid is great but on a little 4 bay mini nas with limited expandability you don’t get much advantage for the money, it’s better for larger arrays and lots of mixed disk sizes, and on systems where you can put in lots of SSDs to make a decently fast caching setup die to unraid slower non-striped array architecture.

On a 4 bay mini-NAS I’d go with the free truenas option and just make it a RaidZ1 of 4 disks.

For a beginner, OMV might be simpler, and for paid options, HexOS is probably more beginner friendly than raw TrueNas.

A free alternative to Unraid is Snapraid, but thats more of a roll-your-own solution, not an OS you can just install.

jellyfin was a fork of emby anyway, its core framework is solid.

Emby has more of the plex-like polish, but it is more closed source than I would prefer to trust with my media, so I get by with Jellyfin. It works more than well enough fro my in-home media streaming and I still run plex for my remote users as I bought a plex pass way back at the start and I’m going to use it until I simply cant anymore… which seems to be rapidly approaching.

I never used it, but it was a popular third party add-on before the feature was integrated.

I’ve had a Lifetime PlexPass since 2013, so I’ve definitely had my moneys worth and then some, but for the last 2 years I’ve been dual wielding Jellyfin and watching it slowly get to the point where I can move over entirely.

I’m 100% Jellyfin now for my personal playback at home, and will be transitioning users over to it as soon as it gets a few more user management features for remote users.

The best HACS addon by far in my opinion has been the Node-Red companion add on that makes combining HA with NR significantly easier and more powerful.

I do almost all of my automation in NR flows and HA is mainly API connector and dashboard frontend.

I have a customised dashboard running on a Sonoff NS panel Pro (using the normal methods to get back to stock android on those panels) I just use it as a button pad for a media room, so the dashboard is mostly just a few pages of buttons in a 3x3 grid for source selection, modes, AC and Lighting controls etc, mostly hitting triggers in Node-Red (via the HACS node-red addon) rather than directly in Homeassistant so that it’s easier to have the dashboard trigger perform a larger chain of tasks easier (in my opinion) than doing it purely in HA.

It’s not perfect… because there’s no easy way to lock a dashboard to a certain pixel height and width without a lot of tinkering with third party plug-ins and SSL.

I’ve got it working pretty well, the one gripe I have is tap and hold functions are impossible as the touchscreen seems too sensitive and there is no dead-zone control for tap and hold.

But recently i’ve programmed a new smart remote for the media room that does most of it on the remote directly, so I only use it for configuring the A/C occasionally now, when my remotes simpler on/off integration isn’t enough.

its been on the experimental branch for a while now

can you run something like iperf3 or openspeedtest between the server and client to prove its a network throughput issue?

do you have a network switch you can add to avoid switching through your router (if it is indeed bad?)

Have you ensured you arent unknowingly using wifi at either end?

NGINX is a bit more hands on than some other options but it’s mature, configurable and there’s a huge amount of information out there for setting it up for various use cases.

in my case, its what I set up when i was first getting into this and it works, so I don’t want to go through setting up anything else.

Thanks for the insightful and helpful comment.

Unraid is great and I have been using it for over a decade now, but a paid OS on a 2bay nas seems excessive

I use Plexamp for that, Jellyfin does it too. You can assign libraries per user quite easily.

So for 3 users you might have 4 libraries, one per user then a shared library they all have access to.

the 2.5" size of disks are now mostly direct USB controller disks rather than sata adapters internally.

3.5" disks are still SATA as far as i’ve seen but the actual sku’s of the disks are often the lower grades. like you will get a disk that looks like another good disk but with only 64mb of dram instead of 256 on the one you would buy as a bare internal drive for example so they can end up a bit slower. and warranties are usually void.

Used to be my main source of disks, but these days there are better ways and it is easier to know exactly what you are getting.

Are you transcoding?

4mbit per client for 1080 is generally a workable minimum for the average casual watcher if you have H265 compatible clients (and a decent encoder, like a modern intel CPU for example), 6 - 8mbit per client if its H264 only.

Remember that the bitrate to quality curve for live transcoding isn’t as good as a slow, non-real-time encode done the brute force way on a CPU. so if you have a few videos that look great at 4mbit, dont assume your own transcodes will look quite that nice, you’re using a GPU to get it done as quickly as possible, with acceptable quality, not as slowly and carefully as possible for the best compression.

You’re confusing a container format (MKV) with a video codec (AV1)

MKV is just a container like a folder or zip file that contains the video stream (or streams, technically you can have multiple) which could be in H264, H265, AV1 etc etc, along with audio streams, subtitles and many other files that go along, like custom Fonts, Posters, etc etc.

As for the codec itself, AV1 done properly is a very good codec but to be visually lossless it isn’t significantly better than a good H265 encode without doing painfully slow CPU encodes, rather than fast efficient GPU encodes. people that are compressing their entire libraries to AV1 are sacrificing a small amount of quality, and some people are more sensitive to its flaws than others. in my case I try to avoid re-encoding in general. AV1 is also less supported on TVs and Media players, so you run into issues with some devices not playing them at all, or having to use CPU decoding.

So I still have my media in mostly untouched original formats, some of my old movie archives and things that aren’t critical like daily shows are H265 encoded for a bit of space saving without risking compatibility issues. Most of my important media and movies are not re-encoded at all, if I rip a bluray I store the video stream that was on the disk untouched.

N5095 ? lots of reports of that one not supporting everything it should based on other Jasper Lake chips, CPU getting hit for Decode when it shouldn’t for example. Also HDR to SDR cant be accelerated with VPP on that one as far as I know so the CPU gets smashed. I think you can do it with OpenCL though.

Was it an n100? They have a severely limited power budget of 6w compared to the n95 at 25w or so.

I’m running jellyfin ontop of ubuntu desktop while also playing retro games. That all sits in a proxmox vm with other services running alongside it. It’s perfectly snappy.

One of my miniPCs is just a little N95 and it can easily transcode 4K HDR to 1080p (HDR or tonemapped SDR) to a couple of clients, and with excellent image quality. You could build a nice little server with a modern i3 and 16gigs of ram and it would smash through 4 or 5 high bitrate 4K HDR transcodes just fine.

Is that one transcoding client local to you? or are you trying to stream over the web? if it’s local, put some of the budget to a new player for that screen perhaps?