Has anyone tried to horizontally scale jellyfin to running on a multi node cluster?

I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.

For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote hardware acceleration strategy...

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...

The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.

But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)

FWIW, I have managed 10 simultaneous live transcoded streams on a ARC B580 and it could have managed a few more. With couple of them you cold be fine.

The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.

With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.

Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.