Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.

definetly a better deal than buying a Raspberry PI, though it will consume more power.

I have a RPI running pihole and nginx for reverse proxying. It does the job pretty well, so I guess your Thin Client will run a similar stack as well.

For more demanding apps like jellyfin you‘d need to get a more powerful hardware depending on the media streamed, the count of simultaneous streams and if you want to youse hardware de-/encoding. Plus 8GB Ram would be a bit short if you plan to run more than the 3 apps I mentioned.

You can get older, small formfactor PCs for about 80 - 100$ depending on your hardware needs.

Try, find out, report back!

I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I’m not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.

I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.

Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.

Hey! My home server is an HP T630 with a GX-420 GI as well, but only 4 GB of RAM. I upgraded from a Raspberry Pi 3 and it’s been awesome. I’m currently running 18 Docker containers on it without issue. I use Jellyfin on my primary workstation that has my media instead if this server, but I run things like Paperless, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Gitea, Wallabag, Pi-hole, NocoDB, and many more. It’s been great, I think thin clients are a great low-cost, low-power solution to x86 home servers.

I paid around $40 or $50 USD for mine, so $10 sounds great!

Let me know what questions you have. I can try throwing Jellyfin on it to see how it performs too.