merthyr1831

As others have said. The errors are easily fixed and documented if annoying. Some will require console access but are usually pretty safe.

It's surprising how slow open source is on replicating Roku. So many manufacturers could be using Linux to bypass androidTV and RokuOS bullshit. I suppose AndroidTV is good enough even despite that.

There's a bunch of technical debt passed off as features, too. Like, Nextcloud runs background tasks as a cron job which is something I've never seen with other hosted services. It's probably a holdover from before containerised applications were ubiquitous but honestly it comes off as jank.

Also, I wonder if there would be an argument for a Nextcloud fork that doubled down on PHP by utilising something like Laravel to put all the rendering on the server side. Right now it uses VueJS which is fine, but PHP is really best suited for server side rendering that you just can't leverage when using a front end framework in JavaScript.

the new name is pretty slick so not all that bad

Cloudflare is known for being unreliable with how and when it enforces the ToS (especially for paying customers!). Just because they haven't cracked down on everyone doesn't mean they won't arbitrarily pick out your account from thousands of others just to slap a ban on. There's inherent risk to it

Even just basic API versioning would be sufficient. .NET offers a bunch of ways to handle breaking changes in APIs

they also have good free tiers for hosting services i think? see them come up at a lot as an alternative to oracle for hosting small svcs

MergerFS and SnapRAID could be good for you. It's not immediate parity like with ZFS RAID (You run a regular cronjob to calculate RAID parity) but it supports mismatched drive sizes, expansion of the pool at any time, and some other features that should be good for a media server where live parity isn't critical.

Proxmox and TrueNAS are nice because they help manage ZFS and other remote management within a nice UI but really you can just use Debian with SSH and do the same stuff. DietPi has a few nice utilities on top of Debian (DDNS manager and CLI fstab utilities, for example)but not super necessary.

Personally I use TrueNAS but I also used DietPi/Debian for years and both have benefits and it really matters what your workflow is. OMV supports everything you want too (incouding SnapRAID) but takes extra setup which put me off.

Docker or LXC containers won't hurt your performance btw. There's supposedly some tiny overhead but both are designed to use the basic Linux system as much as possible: they're way faster than on WSL. For hardware acceleration it'll be deferred to the GPU for most things and there's lots of documentation to set it up. The best thing about docker is that every application is kept separate to eachother - updates can be done incrementally and rollbacks are possible too!

I use nginx proxy manager and expose it behind a subdomain entry on cloudflare (though you can use any DDNS service i bet). NPM handles the security so I get HSTS and HTTPS on Plex and Jellyfin without either needing it set themselves.

From there anyone can access Jellyfin/Plex via my subdomains (plex.mydomain.com or watch.mydomain.com at the mo)

You may have to use port forwarding or a reverse proxy but the end result is functionally identical to plex. IMO the server detection feature of Plex is overengineered for what it is, and I just sit it behind my reverse proxy and connect to it that way.

As for music and apps yeah Plex is pretty nice, but even for audio you could use other services if Jellyfin didn't fit your needs like Navidrome

My setup was about 500 USD if I had to guess:

Used i5 9500 (mainly for QSV but you can use any modern CPU as long as the iGPU is relatively recent)

32GB RAM (more RAM = more cache for file IO)

4TB HDD

256GB NVME boot drive (recycled from my steamdeck)

Node 804 case.

TrueNAS SCALE for the OS.

I'd recommend to get double or even triple the drives I did, maybe 3x 2TB or 3x 1TB depending on your budget. Only because that unlocks RaidZ1/RaidZ2 which can give you better RW speed and redundancy should anything go splat, and you can't retroactively convert your drive into a Z1/Z2 pool without manually transferring the data later which might take a looooong time for you.

I dont think my route was the cheapest: IMO youd do better going AMD even despite the poorer support for HW transcode only because the motherboards are insanely expensive and hard to find, whereas that money couldve given me a better CPU and later you can add an intel iGPU if you're really struggling.

Jellyfin supports HW transcoding on Rockchip too, but the issue with the Pi5 specifically is that it doesn't have a hardware media decoder so it's actually worse than the Pi4 if you can get HW transcoding running on it.