Hardware Review: Is the Raspberry Pi 5 + NVMe HAT the Ultimate Low-Power Jellyfin Server?

What is Jellyfin? Jellyfin is an open-source media server software that allows you to stream your personal digital media to all devices connected to the same network. It’s an incredible alternative to premium options that tend to have paywalls stopping you from downloading from your own servers and other quality-of-life mechanics that you’d want. However it does rely pretty heavily on databases to fetch movie summaries, cast pictures, and album art. Browsing such  large libraries can be a bit daunting for an SD card but on the NVMe drive, the difference becomes night and day:

• Library Navigation – data delivery is instantaneous and loads without stutter. The biggest upgrade is seen in the library scans that instead of taking 20 minutes on older storage mediums/formats, will only take 3 minutes.
• Transcoding Realities – Raspberry Pi 5 unfortunately has still has some hardware limitations in this industry which would be the lack of a hardware video encoder block. While it does have some splendid hardware decoding capabilities, video transcribing (converting video formats on the fly) must be done in software by the ARM CPU. There will be a heavy spike in CPU usage when transcribing a single 1080p video, nevermind a freeze with a 4k transcode.
  • How can you avoid this? Make sure the devices accessing the Jellyfin server are modern devices that can handle the higher resolutions and different file formats, direct play capabilities will always run smoother without any headaches.
• Direct Play – streaming without having to alter  the file format is flawless because the NVMe drive can push hundreds of megabytes of data per second and the Pi 5 itself can serve around 2 to 3 simultaneous 4k streams across the network (I’ve only tested with 2). This means that other background services like my kavita server running on the second SSD drive won’t experience any slowdown.