Serviio

Hi, folks. Complete novice here. I've been using Serviio for a few years to stream movies and music and media to different devices from a (now dying) desktop PC. Always relied on my Dad, an avid computer nerd, to setup our home system, but he passed away this year. I need to figure out what sort of system can best accommodate our three or four hard drives, which are currently inside the old PC. Any advice you can offer?

Thanks in advance, by the way!

So sorry for your loss. His IT skills were I'm sure nothing compared to everything else he was to you and your family.

For a media computer, I've found that it doesn't really take a high powered rig. If your media doesn't require transcoding, then a really simple PC will be fine. When you combine transcoding with multiple simultaneous users, the power requirements start climbing. I run two separate Serviio computers, as I use one for testing purposes. The test server is an older AMD quad core processor with 8 GB of ram. It has a very simple, low power video card, which offers no GPU processor unloading. I've never encountered any playback issues that relate to the computer hardware itself.

My main media server is an Intel i5-6400 quad core, again with 8 GB of ram. I do have a bit better video card in this one, which can unload some CPU processing tasks for programs that can utilize it. I don't know if Serviio has that ability. Both computers run Windows 10, with one being the Home version and one being Pro.

I would suggest a reasonably priced quad core CPU with 8 GB of RAM. One important factor is your ability to stream the media without any bottlenecks. For this, you need fast hard drives and preferably a Gigabit network. Now, if none of your media contains any ripped UHD movies, a "normal" Fast Ethernet network will likely be just fine. I prefer the media server being on a wired network, and if WiFi is necessary use if for the player devices. There are times that a good 802.11ac network can easily exceed the speed of a Fast Ethernet connection (100 Mbps).

If you expect to be streaming to multiple players at the same time (I might have three going at once in my home) it can help to spread your media across multiple hard drives. That increases the odds that not every player will be streaming a file from the same hard drive. Using SATA III drives, the transfer rate should never be a bottleneck.

For operating systems, chances are Windows would be the simplest to use. Linux is more powerful, and can do more on lesser hardware, but is far more demanding to set up and configure. The Mac OS is familiar to some users, but there the hardware can get quite expensive.

Just a few thoughts for you to mull over. Feel free to ask anything additional if you have questions.

Very generous of you, Dan, to reply so fulsomely. I've browsed some attractive prospects on Newegg along the lines you described and they're more affordable than anticipated. I'll probably select one with A question: does it matter much whether I house the drives containing the media in an external enclosure? It seems much more sensible than trying to find a large enough CPU with enough drive shelves.

The loss of my father has indeed been crippling. I appreciate the reference.

The issue with an external drive enclosure is that how ever many drives you have in the enclosure will all be using the single USB connection. It's unlikely that you'd saturate a USB 3.0 connection unless you have multiple players streaming at the same time. But internal drives will all have an independent SATA connection to the bus. I prefer the drives all within my tower case. My main server has a PCI-E M2 drive as my OS volume, leaving all 6 SATA ports available for drives. I have 5 hard drives and a Blu Ray optical drive that I use for ripping my media.

I thought I’d provide another perspective. I have been using Serviio for almost a year and have gone through 3 configurations. I use the media server daily, but seldom have more than one device streaming at a time. Also, none of my media needs to be transcoded. So processing and throughput are not a big issue.

I started using Serviio with my laptop as an experiment to see how it worked. The laptop was an HP Pavilion with a 4 core i7, 12G RAM, and 256G M.2 SSD. I soon found I liked locally streamed media.

I decided I wanted a server that would be available 24x7, so power consumption was some concern. I got Raspberry Pi Model 3 as a Christmas gift two years ago and thought I’d give that a try. The Pi is a Linux Micro PC with a Quad core Broadcom CPU (Think cheap phone) and 1 G RAM. I added a USB 3.0 500 GB external hard drive. It worked “OK”. A single stream was no issue, but on occasion it would sluggishly respond to menu navigation commands from the Roku clients. I used this configuration for 8 months.

I had a desire to add a 24x7 file/backup server. Since Linux backup software is pretty crude, I found a Windows 10 PRO Mini PC for less than $200 that seemed perfect- A quad core Pentium, 4GB RAM, 128G SSD, and an internal 2.5” SATA bay that I put a 1T Byte HDD in. I have been using this last configuration for about a month and am extremely happy. Clients are very responsive. Another plus for this box is it uses less than 10 watts.

I agree with Dan that Windows is a simpler installation. I ran into some issues with the Linux installation that these forums helped resolve, but more technical knowledge is required than Windows.

I used to run Serviio on my desktop PC when I first started using it, but for the past several years I've been running it on a headless Raspberry Pi, with the library stored on an external 3Tb 2.5" USB drive connected to one of the USB ports on the Pi. Total cost was not much at all, and I've had no problems with it. The Pi sits in my laundry cupboard next to the Internet router, using a wired connection to one of the Ethernet ports on the router, and runs 24/7. I'm using Raspbian Buster as the OS, and Serviio 2.

There are numerous tutorials on the web for setting up an RPi - eg https://pimylifeup.com/headless-raspberry-pi-setup/, and for installing Serviio 2 I used these instructions: http://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2019/08/serviio-20-on-raspbian-buster.html.