I know this isn’t build a pc, but everything over there is so gaming oriented I thought I might get better advice here.
I’m a noob that wants a home media server for sharing photos of my kids with my family (across the country), video library sharing to some family members, and streaming my music collection to my phone (and maybe my dad’s).
But I’m considering ripping my father in laws extensive bluray collection (well seeing it up so he can rip them into my library) so I reckon a full tower is required for HDDs.
I’m imagining unraid, with a big pile of used drives. What I like about that approach is that I can economically add storage as the video library grows as I/we rip. Or are used HDDs a false economy.
I think the only processing intensive thing in the use case list is ripping and video library sharing. I have no concept of what sort of processing is required. Should I get a graphics card?
There’s a Lenovo TS-140 (E3-1226 V3) available available used for $80 Canadian. Is that a good place to start?
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You’ll need a decent GPU to decode HD video, which led me to just put together what’s basically an outdated gaming PC from old parts and a couple cheap ones I had to order. Works great as a jellyfin server.
Not if you’re serving content to a device that can do the decoding, like a Shield. My Jellyfin server runs in a Proxmox VM with no GPU passed though, and transcoding disabled for all accounts.