Your Jellyfin server doesn’t need 80TB of storage — you just need to stop hoarding 4K movies

Published Sep 15, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Anurag is an experienced journalist and author who’s been covering tech for the past 5 years, with a focus on Windows, Android, and Apple. He’s written for sites like Android Police, Neowin, Dexerto, and MakeTechEasier. Anurag’s always pumped about tech and loves getting his hands on the latest gadgets. When he's not procrastinating, you’ll probably find him catching the newest movies in theaters or scrolling through Twitter from his bed. I was called a rookie when I recently mentioned that my media server has no more than 5TB of storage. I agree that 5TB isn't a very large collection, but the idea that your media server needs double-digit terabytes of storage is flawed. It’s very easy to keep adding things to your media library, especially because there are tools that let you automate what gets added. You don’t need much manual effort. But that can bloat your server beyond what you actually need, and suddenly you start thinking you don't have enough storage. The truth is your media server doesn't need 80 TB of storage. All you need to do is stop hoarding 4K movies you won’t watch and especially stop keeping multiple versions of the same movie. 1080p is a great compromise You're not losing out on much I am not suggesting that you should get rid of 4K entirely. For movies I love and know I'll watch again, I would rather keep the 4K version. But making 4K the default for everything in your library wastes a lot of storage for a difference you may rarely notice. If you have an abundance of drive space, keep as much 4K content as you want. If storage is limited, 1080p is a great compromise. This is especially true if you watch most of the time on a laptop or phone. The advantage of 4K depends heavily on screen size and viewing distance. Even on a TV, the difference between 1080p and 4K becomes hard to resolve at normal viewing distances. Plus, resolution also isn't the only thing that determines picture quality – bitrate matters too. For example, a high-bitrate 1080p encode can look better than an aggressively compressed 4K encode because the latter has far more pixels competing for a limited amount of data. Not every 4K release comes from a native 4K master. Plenty of movies, particularly effects-heavy productions finished during the era when 2K digital intermediates were common, have UHD releases that upscale a 2K master to 4K. That does not make the 4K version pointless, since it can still offer HDR, a wider color gamut, and a higher-quality encode, but the improvement in actual image detail can be much smaller than the resolution label suggests. A lot of TVs can upscale content to 4K And they do a decent job at it Another reason I am comfortable keeping movies at 1080p is that modern 4K TVs already upscale lower-resolution content. In fact, a 4K television has to scale a 1080p signal to its native 3840 × 2160 panel resolution to display it properly. Sony TVs such as the new Bravia line use XR 4K Upscaling, XR Super Resolution, and XR Clear Image to improve lower-resolution sources. Samsung's Neo QLED models use 4K AI Upscaling, with models such as the QN80H using its NQ4 AI processor and neural networks to enhance content toward 4K resolution. LG does something similar with 4K Super Upscaling on TVs powered by its Alpha AI processors, including its current UHD and NanoCell models. TCL also offers 4K upscaling across various ranges, with its AiPQ processing designed to improve the clarity of lower-resolution video. Of course, upscaled 1080p is not the same as native 4K. Upscaling cannot magically restore fine detail that was never present in the original 1080p image, and in side‑by‑side comparisons, you will still prefer the good native 4K source. But that isn't really the point. If your goal is to keep your media server reasonably sized, a high-quality 1080p file combined with a TV that handles upscaling well is a pretty good compromise. Including Tdarr and Claude Code If you really don't want to delete your 4K movies, another option is to optimize the files you already have. You can recover a surprisingly large amount of storage without reducing everything to 1080p. I recently used Tdarr to do the same to my media library. You can point it at your media library and create rules for how different files should be processed. For example, it can find older H.264 movies and re-encode them to H.265/HEVC, remove audio or subtitle tracks you don't need, and remux files into a different container. You can also use Unmanic for the same. Its plugin system makes it easy to build a specific optimization workflow. You can automatically compress video, remove unnecessary streams, standardize codecs and containers, and even reject a new encode when it ends up larger than the original. Claude Code also helps clean up your media library. It can audit the folders themselves using tools such as ffprobe and file hashes. That makes it possible to find exact duplicates, multiple releases of the same movie, sample videos, leftover archives, and abnormally large files. The sensible way to do this is to start with read-only access and have the agent produce a report instead of giving it permission to start deleting files.