Hi, I’m fairly new to the self-hosted universe but I like the idea of self-hosting media (I’ve looked at Jellyfin and Plex). But as I understand this requires quite some money and a lot of work. I don’t think it’s worth it if I put in all that effort just for myself but I’d love to build a small private streaming between me and my friends. We used to share and swap blu-rays after all, so it would be cool to build a shared collection.
My question is if that’s possible and if anyone has experience with this? I’ve read that Jellyfin and Plex are meant as home-media-servers and I’m not sure what limitations that implies. Can people access the library from outside networks and will that affect the streaming quality/speed? What specs would the server need to ensure it can handle a bunch of users? Is there a software that is better suited for this use-case?
Thanks in advance for any help!
As an example, I used an old PC and purchased a PCI-E card with a bunch of SATA connections. So the cost was about $30 for the SATA card. The biggest cost was the drives, about $90 per 4TB (x5 because I’m using a ZFS raid setup).
I’m buying 10 more 12TB drives (and 2x 2TB NVME drives) for a future expansion which is when I’ll retire my current gaming PC to be the NAS and donate the current server to whoever needs it. If you buy a dedicated device it’ll be more expensive but you won’t need to install Linux on it or configure it, they’ll usually have easy to use software accessible via a web interface. If you’re comfortable with Linux you can use just about any hardware to get you started.
Like Xanza said, I don’t consider it part of my media server. It’s generic storage that I use for everything. Security system recordings, backups, AI models, self-hosted cloud services like NextCloud, storage for my various syncthing clients, etc.