Is it a bad idea to use a laptop as a Jellyfin media server? Is it far better to use a desktop for that?
@hehemrin Probably depends on what you are serving, how many users, etc.
Im using a Raspberry Pi from 2014 to serve music and 480p movies to my phone.
@ike Thanks. By the way, do you use an external USB-drive for data? Or is the SD card in the Raspberry Pi enough for your memory needs? Or anything else?
@hehemrin I use an external 1TB SSD via USB.
I did have to fuss with the streaming settings quite a bit to get acceptable performance. When I rip my DVDs, I also transcode to the appropriate resolution. When I watch a movie on the mobile app, there is about 10-15 seconds of buffering.
For music, streaming in mp3 or flac is just fine and no optimization is needed.
@hehemrin Yeah this is jellyfin. I expect that if you are running on even a semi-recent laptop, you will have a lot more processing power than my raspberry pi and better UX with streaming higher bitrate media.