Jellyfin
Media server for films, series and music, with optional hardware transcoding.
Direct play is cheap, transcoding is not. Hardware acceleration decides whether a small machine copes. Media files are user data and are sized separately.
Planning figures used by the calculators: RAM 4 GB (our estimate), CPU 2 cores (our estimate), storage 60 GB (our estimate). These cover the application itself. Your own photos, films, documents and recordings are entered separately as data storage.
The table lists every figure we hold, what kind of claim it is, and the fragment of the archived document it came from.
Source: Jellyfin hardware selection guide, retrieved 2026-09-08, archived as document 2 on the sources page.
Add Jellyfin to a stack or read how we label a number.
| property | value | basis | evidence | document |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cpu plan cores | 2 cores | our estimate | Derived from the archived document: Assuming hardware acceleration is properly configured, any modern CPU with 4 threads should be able to handle the workload. The four threads describe the whole machine, and the recommended list starts at a 4-core Intel N100, so we plan 2 cores for Jellyfin itself and let the model add the rest of your stack on top. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| cpu platform | Intel N100 or better with hardware acceleration | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: CPU: Intel Core i5-11400, Intel Pentium Gold G7400, Intel N100, Apple M series or newer (excluding Intel J/M/N/Y series up to 11th gen) | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| cpu reco cores | 4 threads | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: Assuming hardware acceleration is properly configured, any modern CPU with 4 threads should be able to handle the workload. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| gpu | A GPU is recommended for transcoding | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: If there is no GPU available on a Jellyfin Server, the CPU can also be used to tone-map HDR content to SDR. This can be very demanding on the CPU, therefore a GPU is ALWAYS recommended. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| ram min gb | 4 GB | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: RAM: 8GB. (4GB may be sufficient for a Linux server without its own GUI.) | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| ram plan gb | 4 GB | our estimate | Derived from the archived document: RAM: 8GB. (4GB may be sufficient for a Linux server without its own GUI.) We plan the headless figure because a home server has no desktop, and the model adds shared OS memory separately. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| ram reco gb | 8 GB | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: RAM: 8GB System RAM (Consider adding more on Windows 11) | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| storage plan gb | 60 GB | our estimate | Derived from the archived document: Storage: 100GB SSD for your OS, Jellyfin files and transcoding cache. We plan 60 GB for Jellyfin files and transcoding cache and count the operating system once for the whole machine. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |
| storage reco gb | 100 GB | vendor recommended | Quoted from the archived document: Storage: 100GB SSD for your OS, Jellyfin files and transcoding cache. | Document 2, retrieved 2026-09-08 |