Jellyfin VPS requirements: what you can run without a GPU

Sizing guide

Our recommendations, derived from the sourced figures below. Not measurements.

Official requirements

What people report in practice

Individual reports, not controlled tests. Versions, hardware and settings differ, so treat these as data points, not guarantees.

• Idle at 140 MiB in a single container. Software x264 (veryfast) transcodes of a 60-second 1080p30 H.264 clip: 1080p to 720p at 4 Mbps ran at 3.79x realtime, 480p at 4.93x, full 1080p at 8 Mbps at 2.76x. Peak 665.6% CPU and 673.7 MiB RAM. The tester's estimate: about two concurrent 1080p transcodes on that chip

  Jellyfin 10.11.11 with bundled FFmpeg 7.1.4-Jellyfin on an Intel i5-10210U laptop (4 cores / 8 threads), no GPU acceleration. A laptop, not a VPS; library management and playback were not tested

  Independent test GR Badhon: Jellyfin 10.11.11 media server, hands-on · checked Oct 23, 2026

• On a Ryzen 5 3600 with no GPU, a forum member expects one or two 1080p transcodes at once without buffering, CPU at 90%+ while transcoding, and no smooth multi-stream 4K

  Jellyfin forum thread, Feb 2024; an opinion from experience, not a benchmark

  Forum Jellyfin forum: Running Jellyfin without a GPU · checked Oct 23, 2026

• A user asking about Jellyfin on a VPS was told to focus on files that direct play; "Folks run Jellyfin servers on lesser provisioned VPS just fine," possibly with two 720p/1080p transcodes, but stay away from 4K unless it will direct play. Another reply warned that VPS plans include a set amount of bandwidth, with overage fees

  r/jellyfin thread, May 2023

  Reddit Reddit r/jellyfin: Is hardware acceleration without GPU possible? · checked Oct 23, 2026

• A 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X "can choke big time on a single 4k stream" in software; the advice was to pre-transcode media in the background or pick files that clients can play directly

  r/jellyfin thread, Sep 2026

  Reddit Reddit r/jellyfin: Is throwing cores at Jellyfin for software transcoding an option? · checked Oct 23, 2026

• Library scans spawned many ffprobe processes at about 700 MB each, hanging a 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 while scanning 4K HDR movies. Maintainers considered it fixed in 10.11

  Jellyfin 10.9.0–10.9.1, 2024

  GitHub GitHub jellyfin/jellyfin #11588: Library scan causes excessive RAM usage · checked Oct 23, 2026

• After upgrading to 10.11.7, 8 GB (and even 24 GB) was not enough to rescan a 4 TB movie library; ffprobe memory grew without limit on Dolby Vision HEVC files. Limiting scan threads to 2 stopped the crashes. Fixed in 10.11.8 (jellyfin-ffmpeg 7.1.3-5), where a user measured scan RAM only 100–150 MB above 10.11.6

  VM install, Apr 2026

  GitHub GitHub jellyfin/jellyfin #16549: v10.11.7 and ffprobe RAM usage · checked Oct 23, 2026

What drives Jellyfin's RAM use

Transcoding, not the server

Jellyfin's own process is small. Video transcoding uses FFmpeg, and on a VPS without a GPU it runs entirely on the CPU. Re-encoding one 1080p stream can keep several cores busy, and HEVC, VP9 or HDR sources make it much heavier. Each transcode also uses some RAM (673.7 MiB peak in one test), but CPU runs out first.

What forces a transcode

The player decides. Each client tells the server which codecs, resolutions and bitrates it supports, and the server only transcodes what the client can't play (Transcoding docs). Common triggers are HEVC or AV1 files on older TVs and browsers, a bitrate limit set lower than the file, and subtitles that have to be burned in. Picking clients that play your files directly does more for a small VPS than any CPU upgrade.

Library scans and metadata

Scanning runs ffprobe on every new file, and Jellyfin's default tasks also extract chapter images and key frames (Tasks docs). These spikes are temporary but can be big: two GitHub issues above show scans exhausting 4–24 GB on buggy releases. Keep Jellyfin updated, and on a small plan lower the scan thread count in the dashboard.

Disk and bandwidth, the hidden costs

A VPS disk is small next to a media library. Jellyfin's docs allow media on a network share or mounted cloud storage, as long as it reads faster than the media bitrate. Also check your plan's included traffic: an 8 Mbps stream is about 3.6 GB per hour (8 Mbps × 3,600 s ÷ 8), so a few viewers can use hundreds of GB a month.

Gotchas on a VPS

• Turn off transcoding you didn't ask for. In the dashboard's Playback section, check what each session is doing (Direct Play, Remux, Direct Stream or Transcode). If a client keeps transcoding, the fix is usually the client's quality setting or a different app, not a bigger server.
• Don't enable hardware acceleration on a plain VPS. Hardware acceleration needs a GPU or iGPU that Jellyfin can reach through QSV, VA-API, NVENC, AMF, VideoToolbox or RKMPP (Hardware Acceleration docs). Shared-CPU VPS plans don't expose one, so enabling it just makes transcodes fail. Check with lspci -nn | grep -Ei "3d|display|vga".
• Avoid H.264 10-bit files. No Intel, NVIDIA or AMD GPU decodes H.264 10-bit (High 10), so it always falls back to software decoding. The docs suggest converting such files to HEVC 10-bit.
• Put it behind a reverse proxy and firewall. Jellyfin's docs say the server "is not designed to be exposed directly to the internet." On a public VPS, put it behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS and firewall everything else.
• Size the transcode cache. Transcoded segments are written to disk. The docs' rule of thumb is your largest file times your maximum concurrent streams, so a 20 GB file and two streams need about 40 GB free on a fast disk.
• Watch the traffic quota. Streaming out of a data center counts against your plan's traffic allowance. Providers in our tables differ a lot here, so check the included traffic on the provider's page before you invite family.

Cheapest plans that fit

Jellyfin, direct play only (headless Linux): 4 GB RAM and 2+ vCPU

Threshold: Official: 4 GB may be enough on Linux without a GUI; direct play needs almost no CPU (source). Only plans with at least 2 vCPUs are listed.

Jellyfin with occasional 1080p CPU transcoding: 4 GB RAM and 4+ vCPU

Threshold: VPSfit estimate: one 1080p software transcode needed roughly 2.4 laptop-i5 threads at realtime in an independent test (source). Only plans with at least 4 vCPUs are listed.

Plan links marked affiliate link are affiliate links: if you sign up through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. They go to the provider's site, not to the specific plan; the Source column links the plain pricing page we checked. Affiliate status never changes the order. Disclosure.

Jellyfin, official average deployment: 8 GB RAM and 4+ vCPU

Threshold: Official: at least 8 GB for the average deployment; 4 threads assume hardware acceleration, which a plain VPS lacks (source). Only plans with at least 4 vCPUs are listed.

Prices checked Oct 21, 2026 on each provider's official pricing page. EUR prices converted at the ECB rate of Oct 20, 2026 (1 € = $1.1215) only for ranking. See all plans on the cheapest 4 GB VPS page.

Related pages

• Immich requirements: Self-hosted photos and home videos; also does video transcoding, so size the server for both if you run them together.
• Nextcloud requirements: Another storage-heavy app; plan disk for your files, not just the app.
• Coolify requirements: Deploying Jellyfin through a panel like Coolify adds its own RAM on top.