Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

In case you're doubting about doing it: do it. It's fine.

But don't make the mistakes I made :')

1. don't "recycle" an old microSD with osmc or some other system still on it. Start from scratch.

In fact, I bought a new SD card. 32 GB costs a ridiculous 7 €. It's worth not taking the risk with some old one that's possibly been flashed many times before. I'm quite sure some blocks on the one i was using previous were corrupted.

2. don't use raspbian, osmc, debian, ... Use DIETPI. Possibly raspbian lite. It's the absolute minimal system you can get, with a focus on home-servering whatever you want on a rpi. This is the way. It's disabling sending power to whatever is on there that you'll never be using anyhow. Including the option to fully disable local hdmi output, absolutely no local audio-out support, etc. Squeezing all these little ones for sure pays off on a rpi 3 or older.

3. video streaming works fine! Better than local video playing used to be with the osmc/kodi install years ago on the exact same pi. Mkv HVEC H264 at 4.4 Mbps with AC3 sound 384 Kbps: plays smooth in browser. Sure, it's not what you want if you're doing the ultrahd 4K i don't know what, but is good enough for me.

4. invest in the silly cooling accessories. It is worth it. Putting a tiny deskfan on the pi within a minute drops temperature 15-20 °C, while libraryscanning + videostreaming... Glue the cooling elements (1 € or even less) on the chips, buy the tiny fan or a case with fan built in. It's another 6-12 € that is more than worth it.

5. stay away from HDD. They eat lots of energy. SSD is worth it. Even if HDD has external power source: they are slow as fuck, takes a while for disks to start spinning. They're still usefull, as back-up. Another reason to go the DIETPI-way: the back-up disk / live disk shit is easy peasy built in there! No messing around searching how to set that up. Same with (auto-)mounting drives in general by the way.

6. The only downside so far: the Nordvpn-meshnet approach for remote access was a bit more annoying. It's not integrated in the dietpi-vpn (or not yet). So you gotta install nordvpn seperately and make that work.

TL;DR: DIETPI !!!

I will try that in a few days ;)

I'm assuming it will be okay-ish, as long as its 720p or lower and not super compressed and only 1 client connected. Ordered a tiny 3.3V rpi fan, it might help. Or make things worse as it drains some power, who knows.

Used to have kodi on this rpi for a few years, until about 4 years ago. Only local tho, not as server. It struggled hard with playing HVEC. Visibly (annoyingly) lagging. Older filetypes worked very fine.

If it sucks, I can still use it as server remote through vpn, download something, play locally.

Only music jellyfin has somewhat stabilised now. Got 48h without crashing! Think internet connection somehow gets stuck sometimes. Quite certain it's not a RAM, not a temp and not a SSD issue. Gonna put a cron script to regularly check connection, if down to long, reboot. That might "fix" it well enough to be usable longterm, local+remote.

Got it going remote too, can listen to my jellyfin on any network now, with the Nordvpn meshnet it's really easy to set up and presumably that's secure too.