For video encoding, I run an 8th gen Intel i5 8500t. The quicksync is good enough for nearly anything 1080p.
Not sure what you mean by the "scaling".
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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~~I feel like by "scaling" they mean upgradability. So either vertical (adding more drives, ram, cpu) or horizontal (adding more boxes that loadbalance an increase of multiple parallel tasks/users)~~ hahaha ooops
Makes sense. Your 2nd definition is what I take from the term scaling. Let's see if op comes back with any notes.
Jup, just responded on the other comment.
More like would a i5-8500 or i3-9100 be sufficient to run the mentioned services and encode up to 4k, no HDR though.
It states here that the 9300 is quicksync enabled, so should have no problem with nvec @4k. How many streams? I don’t know that one.
What about using Intel ARC GPUs for encoding as they are all kinda made specifically for it, I don't use jellyfin but I got an Intel ARC B310 Eco used for like $45.
Looking at current prices it seems like it's around $120 now, was cheaper last year, but I still recommend looking into Intel GPUs.
I looked into it before but this will get a lot more expensive here. I'm currently mostly looking used HP, Dell or other office PCs.
The Jellyfin doc states that
Intel ARC B series cards require ReBar to be enabled. This means you must use it on a platform with Intel 10th gen, AMD Ryzen 3000 series or newer.
A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that's not a big deal.
My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed.. System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,
If you want a lot of 4k content, then I'd definitely go with the GTX 1660.
It'll most likely be 1-2 users most of the time I guess. For streaming on the TV I'd prefer 4k though. Might look into the N100 systems, thanks.