Jellyfin was the thing that got me into moving forward on my home server in the first place. Previously, we’d been using Plex quite effectively for hosting all our movies and TV shows. Plex is very nice, but has some issues. Primarily their business model hit the reality fan and they started looking high and low for means to fund their development. They started gating features behind a subscription. They offered a lifetime license, but my experience has shown me that sooner or later Lifetime Licenses become limited (that’s a pretty good slogan)
All our media lives on our Synology 1813+. It’s an 8-bay 3.5″ NAS with an Intel Atom processor and tops out at 4GB of RAM. I had Plex and then Jellyfin running on it for a little while, but it struggled. Anytime it needed to do transcoding, it would stumble and buffer. It was a pain.
I had this little ThinkCentre m73 sitting around from a largely unused RetroArch project, and decided to repurpose it. Our Jellyfin install on the NAS wasn’t so deep that we’d lose anything truly meaningful, so I decided to install from scratch.