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).

Emby also seems to be able to automatically merge different versions of shows/movies.

I’ve asked someone and MergeVersions does not change the file/directory structure/naming.

Though the same person also mentioned issues with duplicates even after removing the second library with UHD.

In general plugins like IntroSkipper and PlaybackReporting work flawlessly but I’ll stay away from MergeVersions for now and handle movies with mergerfs for the moment.

You’re right, it’s possible to login without internet if local network access without login is enabled in settings beforehand.

Well yes, it might be a simple feature, but it’s still work someone has to do, and there’s many requested features - as well as maintaining the current feature set. I do expect Jellyfin to get this feature at some point, but it might take another 5 years.

As we’re talking about existing/missing features: Sadly there’s an internet connection required to login to Plex, which is a no-go for me.

And I’d really love a feature to be able to share my library with someone while being logged in the same account. I.e. a kind of federation without duplicating content. Iirc Plex has something like this, by keeping the Plex server and user account separate.

It does work for movies if they’re in the same directory and have the same name before a -.

For shows there’s sadly now way iirc.

E.g. Movie Name (2025) - 1080p x264.mkv and Movie Name (2025) - UHD HEVC.mkv would make Jellyfin show a video selection in the same way they do for audio currently.

Jellyfin in general requires proper naming for media to get detected, which is not problem with automation but not that great for a collection grown over time.

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.

Hopefully no one has their DB on an HDD…

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.

Current Pixels sadly no longer have a headphone jack.

The Pixel 8as battery can be replaced through the back side, but the 8 & 8 Pro battery can only be replaced by removing the screen first. Idk about Pixel 9/10(a/Pro).

GrapheneOS is like any other Android for things like data transfer. Plug in via USB or your preferred wireless protocol.

The problem is that if Firefox does not support features like WebGPU, people will switch to Chrome once they notice web sites don’t work correctly.

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