+1 for dropping plex for jellyfin.

I nuked plex when they started requiring an internet connection to log in- meaning plex was phoning-home even though I had not exposed the service to the internet in any way. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need an evil corporation knowing my catalog of linux distros.

• all of the plex premium options can be replicated for free, so fuckem.

My go-to for “server” hardware:

• Old office desktop: Dell Optiplex SFF, HP Elitedesk SFF, Lenovo Thinkcentre SFF
• CPU: 7th, 8th, or 9th gen Intel i7, preferably something with vPro (really neat OOB management - keep it local)
• RAM: At least 8GB
• OS drive: 256GB SSD at the minimum
• OS: Debian
• Media storage: Something large enough to store your media. 3.5" HDDs are great for this, but SSDs are better if you can get your hands on a large one.

I also have a NAS based out of an old HP Proliant ML110 tower server case from 2004, outfitted with some modern-ish parts. I like it quite a lot. Very server-like, it does the thing.

So many different opinions, so I might as well weigh in.

I’m a classic story of starting with a 1TB external HDD to now my 160TB server. I just kept going and didn’t know when to stop. It’s very affordable to make sure your server is extensible. Start with a decent case with lots of HDD bays. A Fractal R6 is excellent. A modern Intel CPU does great transcoding for x265 and AV1. No GPU required. Then you just need 8-16GB RAM (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Maybe 256GB SSD (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Get one HDD right now. Whatever has a good price/TB. They’re also expensive right now.

The more important question is the OS. I actually prefer Windows. It’s free (if you look on Google how to activate it for free). If you get more than one HDD you should consider DrivePool to pool your drives. Works great and cheap one time cost. If it’s data you can just download again you don’t need to worry about backup. RAID is a good intermediary step, and for that SnapRAID works really well. You’ll need one HDD for parity, and a good rule of thumb is no more than 5-6 HDDs per parity. RAID means that if a disk dies, you can restore the data. Much cheaper than cloud storage.

It really depends on what you need.

Plex relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play thing, otherwise the server needs to transcode it into something that is playable.

Which means that when you curate your library in a way that is completely compatible with your clients, you can run a Plex server on a raspberry pi. If you don’t, and you need transcoding then you also need the hardware to do so.

This also depends on what needs to be transcoding, a 4K video will require a lot more performance than a 1080p Transcode.

Then, you need to distinguish between the different types of transcoding, when you have a Plex Pass, you can use a GPU for the transcoding, otherwise your CPU needs to do that.

In the last 1-1.5 years, the beelink mini pc with the N100 CPU was really popular because it was small, fairly cheap and had a iGPU in it that could even handle a couple 4K transcodes.

So, the first thing I would do is check what your requirements are. Do you have Plex Pass to be able to utilise hardware transcoding? Maybe also look in other players like Plezy for getting better compatibility than the official Plex app.

If your wanting to get into it as cheap as possible, here’s how I’d do it, in stages

Use an old desktop. Install some Linux based is. I really like truenas but there’s heaps of options. Proxmox has been mentioned too

Install Plex, but I encourage you to install jellyfin as well and point it at the same library. Just try it out and see how you like it.

Think about how important your media library is and if you want some redundancy but honestly most media is easily replaceable

Going with a cheap used system, and then adding an Intel a310 is a good start. For getting drives, look into getting some external Seagate drives, popping them open, and using them internally. Just a couple ideas 😊

Got an old laptop? I recommend that. Put linux on it.

The comments aren’t doing a great job of explaining this but Plex can run on virtually any reasonably modern hardware: old laptops, thin clients, an old desktop, scrap parts. If you can get linux running on it, you can run plex for local network usage with one or two users.

Where hardware starts to matter is if you need to expose it to lots of simultaneous users or you need to do lots of transcoding. I do know of some users with giant libraries where the libraries can be a little slow to browse but it can be helped with a cache SSD for the metadata.

At this point the iGPU on intel processors is the easiest way to do transcoding and can handle a lot of streams with hardware transcoding. I used to have a nvidia card in my box and realized the iGPU was actually better anyway. I also think your streams should be direct play as much as possible. It’s much easier and more efficient to have your library on a flexible format to start and just avoid on demand trsnscode.

If you need external access and need a VPN, you need a little extra power - or a separate device.

Now, OP didn’t ask but I’ll give my two cents on Plex vs Jellyfin.

Objectively, Plex is still the easiest to set and forget and is the most feature rich. I used it for something close to 15 years. I finally dropped it when I couldn’t watch live tv anymore because of a known bug they just refused to fix for over a year. That was the last straw for me on top of all the enshittification.

I tried Jellyfin and found it lacking features and it was more difficult to manage securely. That led me to Emby. I’m not sure why it never comes up in these discussions. It’s a nice middle ground. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby from when Emby decided to go closed source to try to figure out a sustainable financial model so they’re very similar but Emby gives you back some of the convenience features from Plex.

But ultimately I think this is a personal preference and none of these are one size fits all. Plex is a reasonable place to start but, in my opinion, Emby is worth a look. Jellyfin is the ultimate choice for open-source, personal control, and privacy that the other two can’t match because of their financial models.

The circlejerk of “Plex bad get JellyFin” always happens here.

JellyFin doesn’t have as many features and if you want to access your library away from home safely it is more complicated to setup.

I love PlexAmp. It has really reintroduced me to so much of my library I forgot I had.

Depending where you live you can find reasonably priced workstations on https://www.govdeals.com/ that can handle being nothing but a media server.

Personally I would do this

Find an old laptop, desktop, any computer

Put proxmox on it. It’s free and lightweight

Create a Plex LXC. Also free and lightweight. There are community scripts to do this.

You should get pretty good performance on Plex, you can manage the computer through a web browser and it only costs you whatever the cost of finding some hardware to put it on is

I haven’t used Plex in a while, but I presume it would go similarly to my Jellyfin migration this year.

I pulled out a 10 year old laptop from my pile of scrap, installed a light-weight Linux server that can run containers, and I’ve been running LinuxServer.io’s Jellyfin container on it. Updates are pretty easy and I don’t have to worry about cluttering the host box’s packages with dependencies that may or may not conflict with the other things I run in it.

If you have the time to figure out how to run apps in containers, I highly recommend doing so. There’s a lot of documentation for Docker, and Docker Compose files make managing the containers pretty easy.

I got a used thinkpad x1 carbon for under 200 a year ago from a used electronics store in my area. It’s running Debian and the YAMS stack, I found it easiest for me to get running as a docker noob

Kodi. So much better than Plex or Jellyfin. Not even in the same category. It just takes more work to setup and customize because it’s so much more powerful. I recommend compiling from source, b/c repos can be old and flatpak is bloated.