Serviio

Hi guys. I've got a 9U rack case and am thinking about filling it with a Serviio-dedicated machine, running Ubuntu/CentOS. What hardware setup can you recommend to run Serviio smoothly?

It will depend on if you expect transcoding to be necessary, and how many simultaneous streams you expect to support. My main server has a quad core AMD Phenom II 965 processor with 8 gig of RAM. I've supported 2-3 streams at the same time without issue, even if one stream requires transcoding. My media is spread across 6 hard drives of 3 TB each. The only changes I make from the default Serviio install is to add some personal transcoding profiles and to use a 64 bit version of FFMPEG, rather than the 32 bit that Serviio includes. Your Linux install will likely be more efficient than my Windows 10 install.

My RAM is likely overkill, as I seldom see any problem when testing on my backup server. It only has a dual core processor and 4 GIG of ram. It occasionally can't keep up with transcoding, but usually when dealing with HD or 4K material. With SD DVD rips, it plays flawless.

So, if you are only planning on one or two streams at a time, a quad core CPU and 4-8 G of ram is plenty. Add more streams with transcoding and add more cores. If transcoding won't be necessary, a dual core is fine. If you expect to stream more than two HD movies at the same time, your network should likely be gigabit. Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) can run out of room with multiple HD video streams rather fast, depending on the file encoding. I have some HD videos that stream at over 35 Mbps. Fast Ethernet could only handle two of those, and leave very little room on the network for anything else.