which generation NUC for jellyfin - eviltoast

I have a small Ryzen-based server that’s functioning as my NAS as well as hosting various docker services. However, I wanted to start doing more with Jellyfin and my server doesn’t have a GPU for transcoding. I was consider getting an Intel NUC anyhow because I wanted to have some dedicated hardware to run a hypervisor like Proxmox, so I figure I’ll run Jellyfin as a VM and it can pull from my NAS server where the video files are stored.

I’m curious what kind of specs I should be looking for on a NUC and which generation? Here’s some of my rough requirements:

  • Running Proxmox with maybe a handful of VMs
  • Jellyfin transcoding for no more than 3 simultaneous users, and in reality, 1 on average
  • Typically prefer more modern, power-efficient hardware
  • tenekev@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I can’t speak about AMD but here is a rundown for Intel CPUs.

    • 6th gen - Widely available, cheap, supports the bare minimum. It transcodes the most widely available codes - h.264, h.265.
    • 8th gen - Same video capabilities as 7th gen but has more cores. Relatively cheap and widely available. I bit more rounded codec support.
    • 11th gen - Previous generations 9th and 10th are incremental and meaningless. 11th introduces AV1 transcoding (Decode only) but it’s still a very meaningful impact because AV1 is both size efficient and very high quality (in most cases, doesn’t play well with noise).

    These are the 3 tiers that I look at. Metor Lake is about to be released with native encode and decode support for AV1 but it’s too early to matter.

    More info in the chart here.