As the title states I am wondering what would be a good machine to build for my piracy. I am open to buying a used machine on eBay and expanding over time.
The last time I was sailing I had a Dell R610 Server Rack but I don’t have the space for this now. So something that can sit behind a tv stand in the corner next to the router.
- I would be running Plex / Jellyfin
- Some kind of torrent software
- Something for NZBs if still viable
- then the usual SONARR, RADARR, etc
I would like to be able to let friends connect from outside my house to stream media and allow them access so they can add films and the server goes off and finds them, extracts them, and adds them to the media server.
Thanks.
I have an ancient (10+ years old) macbook pro running with a Jellyfin server and qBitorrent and a VPN and it works great!
No complaints. (I also have a 2 TB harddrive plugged into it).
Oh that’s great to hear, that things are still running on a decade old hardware. I will factor this into my choices when weighing price points.
Does this ancient macbook pro still receive OS updates? Separate but related for purposes of choosing hardware. Thanks!
No it doesn’t. I run older versions of some software. I plan to switch to linux once macos gives out.
The only things that really matter are storage space and power consumption. If you want to transcode videos, then you will need a GPU that supports encoding whatever codec you want to use.
Thanks.
This is useful as I didn’t really know what “transcoding videos” meant and why I might need to be concerned with it.
I now know that it the process of converting a video from its original format, resolution, or bitrate. And that this can be important if one of my friends is using a device that say isn’t 4K compatible and all my content is 4K.
I know you probably already know this, but I thought I would add for others that may stumble across this.
Nicely done. That’s considerate as hell. I appreciate it.
Thanks dude.
You could use a potato, don’t need crazy specs
If they’re going to be sharing with friends, they’ll need something that can handle transcoding in order to eliminate all the complaints about “the movie isn’t working!” due to varying codecs and client compatibility. Any 7th or 8th gen or newer Intel chip (QuickSync) should work or something with a GPU.
I was going to have potato for tea, but I guess not now.
You can also mash them, boil them, or put them in a stew.
🤯
You monster
Depends on numbers of simultaneous streaming capability you need i think. I recently bought a 50 € used esprimo “office computer” and it runs very well. I put a 50 € 1TB nvme SSD+ ~200 € 4TB external ssd and a 30 € wifi pci card and good to go, ± 330 € total… Used an old 1TB HDD i still had for back-up. It wouldn’t suffice for dozens of simultaneous streams with transcoding, but it runs my <5 users jellyfin+deluge+nextcloud very well.
