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
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I’m running 6th, 7th and 8th gen nucs, all i3s, in a cluster with about 9 vms between them. I’ve run plex and jellyfin off of both the 7th and 8th without any issues. I’ve only had two transcodes happen simultaneously since I don’t really share my server outside of my household but based on usage I don’t think 3 would be an issue.
If it was me, I would be looking at an 11th gen i3 (tnh-i3000 I think). The taller chassis models have space for an m.2 and an SSD so you can mirror your drives, have 2.5g Ethernet, and have add-on modules to add another 2.5g port.
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I just built a new server and installed proxmox on it. I5-14600. I had planned on using an Ubuntu vm running Plex via docker.
Long story short, but ended up scrapping proxmox and going straight Ubuntu server w/Plex in docker. The complexity of getting the igpu to pass thru and manage the resources for Plex and the other random things I plan to load just wasn’t worth it. My goal was to make plex as fast as possible. I have a truenas scale server that has all my media.
I had to install all the intel igpu drivers manually because it wasn’t showing up. Proxmox just didn’t see worth it since everything I wanted to run can exist in a docker container.
I can’t speak for NUCs, but I use a sff thinkcentre with an 8th gen i7 for jellyfin transcoding. I have, at most, 4 streams going at any given time, and it works very well. I bought it used from ebay for around $200.
This is they way. At least in the US where these things are very cheap. In my country you need to bee very lucky to even find the old ones for under $150…
Anything with Kaby Lake is good enough, with Tiger Lake it’s even better. So if you look for used PC should choose at least Core i3 8th Gen, or Gemini Lake like Celeron J4125. New purchase just go for N100, basically unbeatable.
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.