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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2025

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  • tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi

    I’ve never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If it’s at home and not on a sailboat or drone, don’t worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.

    Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably can’t upgrade the hardware anyway.

    Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.

    Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.

    So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.

    In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).








  • Hate to be the guy that says “why don’t you just do <different setup>?” But unless you are on solar, I wouldn’t worry about power consumption. Jellyfin is a resource-intensive program and you’ll have a better experience with a dedicated graphics card (as recommended in the docs). I also recommend SATA or PCIe storage I/O instead of USB.