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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I have a Pi 4B with 8 GB RAM and run Jellyfin plus some other stuff on it. Works great.
Had it first installed via repo but transcoding did not work at all. After switching to the Docker setup though, transcoding worked ok out of the box. Definitely takes a few seconds before the stream starts when having to transcode but no hiccups afterwards. Unless you jump around of course, and also I never had more than one stream trandcoding.
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
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.
Als Privatnutzer bekommt man ja eher seltener gigantische Mengen an Papier per Post. Das sind dann maximal ein paar Briefe pro Woche und dann ist es auch total egal, ob die OCR 10 Minuten pro Brief braucht. Und wenn du als Firma wirklich noch eine größere Menge an Briefpost zu verwalten hast, dann ist ein Raspi definitiv die falsche Wahl
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…
Travel server? Now that’s an idea
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 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.
