You’d probably get better conversations at selfhosted I know some folks there run *bsd network appliances. NASs, firewalls, etc.

You don’t need to pop it out to DD the SD card, you can do it while it’s running. I like to pipe DD through gzip to get a compressed image as the output so I’m not sitting on 16gb file for 3gb worth of files.

I’ve had a basic DLNA server running for over 5 years and just set up jellyfin about a month ago and it’s an absolute game changer. It has the functionality of a good streaming service except using your own media. It searches databases and matches it to your files so you get some really good images with the interface and information about the media. Plus it remembers what you’ve watched and how far you are into episodes and movies. Which is perfect if you have two or more TVs or devices you watch on.

It’s changed my partners preferences on how they watch shows. They hated watching anything on my server because they have ADHD and it’s impossible for them to figure out what they were watching and where they were in it, not to mention trying to navigate my lack of organizing anything. Jellyfin fixes that. Now I just plop a show into the shows folder, or a movie in the movie folder and it’s dealt with.

In my experience the jellyfin app on my LG TV works phenomenally. The media app is absolutely horrendous, it takes several minutes to list media files every time a new folder is opened.

Jellyfin has been a game changer specifically in keeping track of what I’ve watched and how far into an episode or movie I am. Everything else is a bonus.

I hate to admit that I love using these micro business computers, but they’re pretty awesome. Stackable, powerful, upgradeable, cheap second hand or refurbished. I’ve considered nucs, but you can find buckets of these for cheaper.

Not op, but a nuc idles around 5 watts, and at load can use up to 100 watts depending on specs. A raspberry pi4 idles somewhere around 3.5 watts and at load is still under 10 watts.

I second the Synology, I currently have a 2 drive version setup as raid 1 with 3TB drives. It was super easy to set up, and I haven’t touched it in about 5 years now. Set everything up how I wanted and it’s worked flawlessly ever since. Granted, I set it up for myself, not for anyone with an aversion to technology. I much prefer to have a large amount of my data under my own control, plus I get to keep full resolution photos, videos, etc. without worrying about running out of space.

Plus transferring data over a home network is so much faster than through an ISP (at least with what’s available to me).