Roku is really simple and locked down. There’s ads on one side but nothing else. My 80yo grandma uses it.

Otherwise Projectivy is an Android TV launcher that can be configured to be really stripped down. It takes a bit of time but if you do it right it’d show less options than even Roku (it’d show only the apps you select, no launcher settings etc).

As a box I’ve heard good things about Onn (Walmart) if your in the US. If not, Homatics is great but pricey. Kick Pi KP1 is more affordable (but still way more expensive than Onn).

This. The blue line is the watched progress and the orange line is the transcoding progress.

Unless the media also uses HDR in which case the server will still be required to transcode.

Ugreen NAS support other OS. You could put TrueNAS or Proxmox on there, so no, there’s no security concerns (beyond all computer hardware being partly manufactured there in some way).

It won’t save you from doing a bit of work but you could use podman. There’s systemd integration so you can still start/stop/enable your services with systemctl while using docker/container images. You won’t be able to use docker-compose directly, but it’s usually not that hard to replicate the logic with systemd (Immich was a PITA at first (because they had so many microservices split into multiple images, but it improved considerably over the first two years).

I do this with NixOS quite a bit, and I’ve yet to use docker compose (although the syntax is different, it’s still the same process).

Given OP mentioned torrent and watching media in the same sentence I assume they didn’t rip their own media, and pirated it instead.

If my assumption is wrong, I apologize.

Especially anime often use the superior .ass subtitle format, which many devices don’t support. Sadly Crunchyroll is switching to .srt which has broader support, so it likely won’t require burning them in the video (transcoding), which is the only positive thing (still a shame imo).

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1nuxuzs/crunchyroll_has_downgraded_their_subtitles

Given they use a N100, I’d suggest redownloading instead of transcoding for time, energy and quality savings (i.e cost).

And making sure Tailscale auto launches on a FireTV stick is a pita too. Telling them to open Tailscale on each start is not an option.

Setting up auth before Jellyfin breaks clients. This is not an option. Edit: Unless you meant VPN like Tailscale, but then you’d have to install Tailscale too, which I don’t want to explain to others.

And sharing my libraries with other friends sharing back with me is pretty great.

This feature is imo THE killer feature of Plex, although I use Jellyfin. There’s no sharing of libraries like Plex does. Multiple user accounts per server, yes, but you have to switch between servers and search separately.

I also wholeheartedly recommend Restic. Hetzner Storage Box or Backblaze B2 are great storage backends and directly supported by Restic.

Borg is great too, though I’ve never used it because I’ve discovered Restic first.

Interesting. I’ve had a worse experience with my music library because of how Navidrome didn’t support multi artist tags properly until recently. But while writing this comment, I checked again and they merged it in 0.55.0!

So I’d recommend giving Navidrome a try too. Symfonium is a great client.

Some game servers, some ISPs don’t provide IPv6 for (some of) their customers.

Sadly they’ve gone up in price over the last 6 months.

Mindfactory had 16TB for 160€ (10€/TB), but now they want 240€ for 18TB (13.3€/TB).

On eBay there’s sellers like HMCW, which are now also more expensive. But returns/warranty are questionable to say the least.

Edit: I wanna punch myself because I didn’t get one at the time.

Yes, even IPv4 was intended to give each device in the world their own IP, but the address space is too limited. IPv6 fixes that.
Actually, each device usually has multiple IPv6s, and only some/one are globally routable, i.e. it works outside of your home network. Finding out which one is global is a bit annoying sometimes, but it can be done.

Usually routers still block incoming traffic for security reasons, so you still have to open ports in your router.

If you go with IPv6, all your devices/servers have their own IP. These IPs are valid in your LAN as well a externally.

But it’s still important to use a reverse proxy (e.g. for TLS).

Many places don’t enforce those laws for simply torrenting.

Some countries (US) ask the ISP to send warning letters and might disable the internet. In other countries law firms get personal details from the ISP and send a costly letter of a thousand Euro for a single infraction like in Germany.

I would ideally like to convert the library to h.265 or even AV1 if I can make it work.

Unless you’ve downloaded remuxes (which I doubt), I’d seriously recommend redownloading instead of converting your existing files.

h.265 and especially AV1 take a long time to encode by CPU, and hardware encoding won’t give you any space savings, unless you’re okay with losing much details.

Redownloading is most definitely faster, will result in more space savings for the quality you’ll get. PS: Unless you’ve got data volume limits, but even then I’d recommend slowly upgrading over time. It’s quite simple with TRaSH guides and giving h.265 a higher score.

• ActualBudget for finances.
• Radicale for calendar/contacts.
• Immich for photos/videos.
• Redlib as a frontend for Reddit (LibRedirect ftw).
• TheLounge as an IRC client.
• Bitwarden/Vaultwarden as a password manager.
• paperless-ngx for documents