this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Hi, I'm fairly new to the self-hosted universe but I like the idea of self-hosting media (I've looked at Jellyfin and Plex). But as I understand this requires quite some money and a lot of work. I don't think it's worth it if I put in all that effort just for myself but I'd love to build a small private streaming between me and my friends. We used to share and swap blu-rays after all, so it would be cool to build a shared collection.

My question is if that's possible and if anyone has experience with this? I've read that Jellyfin and Plex are meant as home-media-servers and I'm not sure what limitations that implies. Can people access the library from outside networks and will that affect the streaming quality/speed? What specs would the server need to ensure it can handle a bunch of users? Is there a software that is better suited for this use-case?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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[–] PatrickYaa@lemmy.one 3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Sorry, just to get this straight: How much was your NAS? And why is that not factored in the cost for the service?

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I bought used Buffalo dual bay NAS. It is not great, but does the job. I think I bought it for around $20. + 3TB harddrive I had at home in my old server and later bought cheap cca $80 Toshiba 4TB.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 3 points 6 hours ago

In my opinion it doesn't really make sense to factor that in. A NAS is a multi-purpose device. In this specific example they would be using it as a media server but that's not its only purpose nor the only purpose it should be used for.

Additionally network attached storage can even be an old computer that you don't use anymore. It's extremely difficult to factor the price of a NAS into an anecdotal response like this and be even partially correct.

Some will be free. Some will be $5,000. Some will be $250. It really depends on your needs, what you have, and what you want out of it.

For example I already had a NAS when I set up jellyfin. I run the server on my local computer to give it access to my GPU for transcoding services and all of the files are saved on the network storage.

So anecdotally what I include the price and to what it cost me to set up jellyfin? I already had the NAS, I didn't have to invest anything... Additionally you don't need network storage you could set it up on your local PC.

It's simply a difficult question to answer.