Does anyone run one of the above on a Pi 4 and can share their experience how good or bad they run?
If course, transcoding won’t be any good and OCR probably cannot run in parallel, but aside from that - is it okay?
Currently running everything on a mini ITX with a i5-6600 which handles this easily for my small use cases, but also draws 20-30W idling most of the day… I’m eyeing a Pi 4b with 8gb RAM but don’t want to spend the money and then realizing that it doesn’t run smooth enough
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It’s very ok, as long as you don’t expect multiple 4K streams at it.
I ran JellyFin on a Pi 4 for about 3 or 4 yrs before it started acting up. So long as you don’t transcode, it works wonderfully well. I had it serving upto 4-5 x 720p streams at same time. IIRC, it can just about do a single 4K, 60? Never tried - all my media is 1080p or less.
IIRC, mine is overclocked and undervolted using PiTools (and is in a Argon 40 case with a m.2). The Argon 40 case (I think) is causing it to short (something with the daughter-board? Dunno). Better options these days.
Paperless I don’t use but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible.
Don’t try Immich unless you like pain (or turn off the AI stuff)
Did you just turn off all transcoding or pre-transcoded to 720p mp4 (or similar)?
Or did you just rely on the native apps for direct play?
Paperless, I guess OCR is very taxing, but I mainly had RAM problems regarding this on my Pi 3, with only one doc at a time, it went slow but steady.
Immich maxed out my i5 (all cores on 100) for some minutes when running the ML on my imported test library of ca. 3k Files. So yeah, when choosing the Pi4, I’d go with ente for sure!
Yeah, transcoding entirely off - directly stream stored 720/1080p files (downloaded like that, although I did use handbrake on the pi once to transcode Space 1999 season 1. Took about 2 days I think).
Someone else was just talking about Wyse thin clients. I’m fairly sure that a $40 Wyse thin client out performs even the best Pi 4 (maybe 5 sometimes). If I can’t find a way to fix mine, I may have to buy a few for uh…science. IIRC, they idle at about the same as the Pi
Yeah, I’ve read about using a Wyse 5070 for this a lot by now. Maybe I’ll explicitly search for them instead. All I’ve seen around me are 4gb models, however. The Stack I’m currently running blocks 3.7gb in idle… So that’s not enough
Zu Paperless-ngx auf dem Pi 4: Für leichte private Dokumentenmengen kann das funktionieren, aber OCR ist der Teil, der schnell zäh wird. Ich würde die Worker klein halten und OCR/Tika/Gotenberg eher auslagern, wenn regelmäßig größere PDFs reinkommen. Paperless selbst ist meist weniger das Problem als OCR + I/O; Jellyfin parallel ist ohne Transcoding deutlich entspannter.
I tinkered for years with numerous Raspberry Pies but got tired of it. Bought a second hand Dell ThinClient Wyse 5070 for like 70€, installed DietPi and its awesome.
Consider papra as a more lightweight alternative for paperless-ngx. I have not used it yet unfortunately.
I tried paperless years ago on my 4B and it did not work well enough to be usable.
Jellyfin was fine.
I’d say getting an x86 think centre or equivalent will cut your idle in half and give you enough overhead to run paperless and jellyfin.
it did not work well enough to be usable.
Was it the overall performance or the OCR specifically?
I have run paperless some time on a pi 3b without OCR (manually doing it on a PC or when scanning with Apps like MakeACopy) and it was okay-ish. Not a lot documents though.
And I thought it was mainly the 1GB RAM limiting (starting Paperless started swapping right away…)
I run a 2019 Dell OptiPlex SFF desktop as my ESXi box - it idles under 20w with multiple Linux and Windows VM’s (4 are standard, besides the ad-hoc ones for testing stuff).
Hard to beat the idle combined with performance when needed. Pi really doesn’t compare.
I run Jellyfin on a Banana Pi M4 Zero. It’s a little less capable than the Pi4 but runs JF just fine. Specs on this one are quad core 1.5 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC on Armbian.
The media files are all on the 1 TB SD card while the Jellyfin data directory (especially the SQLite DB) are on the eMMC. This seems to work much better as the DB file kept getting corrupted on SD. Should also help the SD card from wearing out since it’s pretty much only reading data from it most of the time.
As you guessed, transcoding is not going to work (JF is removing the v4l2 hardware support anyway), so I pre-transcode them to H264 + yuv420p in an mp4 container before moving them to the SD card. I also scale them down to 720p to fit more on there, but that’s because this is a travel server and isn’t my main media source.
Can’t speak for Paperless though.
A Pi as a travel server sounds like an awesome idea!
What are the use cases for taking it with you instead of just connecting to your homelab?
Edit: Your username made me thirsty, too bad I have to wait some hundred years to get one on earth…
Thanks!
What are the use cases for taking it with you instead of just connecting to your homelab?
I built it just to see how much I could cram onto a Pi Zero clone/how many self-hosted services I could have on something I can fit on my heychain, and the answer was “a lot”. It’s something of a travel server, travel router, emergency server, etc.
I mainly just wanted a subset of my homelab services available in something I could take with me anywhere. Home lab could go down while away, power could go out, something to use while glamping, can take it with me if there’s ever an emergency where I have to evacuate, etc.
Services
- Jellyfin (all content pre-transcoded so everything can direct stream)
- CodeServer (setup for Python, NodeJS/Bun + React, and Platform.IO for ESP8266/ESP32 development)
- Kiwix (including the full Wikipedia dump with images as well as offline docs for lots of code libraries I work with, etc)
- SearxNG so I always have a sane search engine available
- CalibreWeb with my whole ebook library
- MPD+Snapcast+My whole music library. Also has myMPD web UI for controlling MPD. Snapcast clients can connect, and it can serve multi-speaker/multi-room audio
- PiHole serving both ad blocking and local DNS as well as providing DHCP for the access point
- PairDrop for sending/receiving files
- NodeRED and Mosquitto MQTT for setting up ad-hoc automations
- Nginx with real LetsEncrypt certs so all services have valid SSL certs and hostnames
Networking
- One USB port is configured in ethernet gadget mode. Can plug it into a host PC and get an IP address from it
- One wifi adapter is setup as an AP and is bridged with the USB ethernet (a PC plugged in and a wifi client are on the same L2 plane).
- The second wifi is the “WAN” connection if one is available. Can alternatively connect to USB tethering on my phone
- If there is any kind of “WAN” upstream, the LAN bridge (USB ethernet/Wifi) will route to it
- Wireguard to connect back to my homelab.
File Services
- Samba
- Encrypted LUKS volume for critical docs (tax records, vet records for the dogs, etc)
I’ve got a second unit that connects as a client to the main one with some additional backup services:
- Email stack( Dovecot, Postfix, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Webmail)
- Matrix/Synapse stack
- Asterisk
- Snapcast client
The second one is basically a backup to my main stack in case of disaster/power outage/etc. Those all tunnel to a cloud VPS + load balancer and only need an internet connection to setup the tunnels to receive traffic from the VPS (and route back out to it). Those services are stopped and a cron task keeps them in sync with the main ones in my homelab. If I need to fail over, I just SSH into the VPS and re-route traffic to them instead of my homelab endpoints.
I self-host my own email and chat and phone services, so those have become critical services I want to always have online. Essentially these little Pi clones are a backup stack for my most used services and one that is both extremely low power and portable should I ever need to host them on the go (house burns down, have to evacuate due to emergency, etc).
Photo
I still don’t have a “full” case for it, but here is the core unit attached to a UPS circuit which gives it up to about 14 hours of runtime. I’m also planning to add a small USB hub with ethernet into that, but I’m still learning FreeCAD so I’m not quite ready to put it all together yet. The USB power cord is wrapped in aluminum foil and electrical tape due to RF from the Wifi adapter causing random glitches. I need to add some ferrite beads and route them away from that when I build it into an integrated case. For now it looks janky but works lol.
Main Unit:
Secondary Unit: This is an older photo and is also connected to my Bose radio acting as a Snapcast client to the server on the main unit.
Wow, that’s a crazy and impressive setup! Pretty amazing what’s possible with something so low power that it could run off of battery and possibly solar alone…
Having such a setup for travel and emergencies is a cool idea, I’ll have to put it onto my “possibly some day” list :)
Thanks, and yeah, it’s been fun putting that all together. Unfortunately I’m still learning FreeCAD so they’re not as integrated as I’d like yet, but as soon as I have time to hammer out a design, I hope to have all 3 of these and the UPS/power supply in a nice case.
Yep, running/charging it from solar is why I ended up getting that chonky 18650-based UPS board. It’s the only one I could find that could combine 5V input and battery without dropping out (battery kicks in immediately if solar insufficient and draws the difference between input and output and charges and powers simultaneously otherwise).
Travel server? Now that’s an idea
