Former-Brilliant-177

I've reached the conclusion that Santa is a tech-phobe. All I get is festive sweaters, novelty socks and alcohol. At least the latter is useful in drowning my tech dreams disappointment :-(

Also a long time homelabber, with a lab that's run on a tight budget. There's no money for the latest and greatest, but today's white hot tech quickly falls out of favour and sooner or later finds it's way to the bargain basement. That's where it'll be.

It's at this point I'll be retiring older tech for newer old tech and so it goes on. Incremental upgrades, never finished.

On the whole, hardware wise, I'm very pleased with what I've got and don't feel I'm missing out, but that won't stop me looking for the next best thing my empty pockets can afford.

If you're planning to expose a server to a world wide audience Cloudflare is a great choice. However, if it's just for you and maybe a few selected friends or family members, consider getting a free Zerotier or TailScale account. You'll have complete control as to who has access.

If you're downloading movies and they are in a file format that Jellyfin can use, there's nothing more to do. If not, use Handbrake to transform them into a usable format.

The two software transcoders I use are, Handbrake and MakeMKV. Of the two, MakeMKV does a really good job and it can tackle Blu-Ray too. Downside, the output files are rather large.

This is where Handbrake comes in. It can really slim down the bloated output from the forma to a more modest size. If you have enough disk capacity, you can skip Handbrake.

Finally, import into Jellyfin. To output to the family TV (not 4K), I'm using a modestly priced Roku streaming device that has a Jellyfin client and it does a pretty good job.

I believe, to achieve 4K you will need to transcode with a GPU.

Currently, I've around 520 movies and probably around a 1000 TV episodes on my Jellyfin server, all transcoded mainly from DVDs and some Blu-ray disks I've bought.