I find their pricing to be rather reasonable. They even have a lifetime plan.

If you don’t want to open any ports, then you will need to setup a VPN service. Tailscale is one of the easiest to use VPNs out there.

I’m in a similar boat. While my current setup is getting by, I’m in the market for something better.

I’m hoping that the shield will soon get a refresh when Nintendo releases their next console. If so, I’ll be picking up a shield for sure.

There’s no enshitification happening if the product hasn’t gotten any worse. It’s just a pricing change. In fact, if the pricing change does in fact lead to a better product then this is the complete opposite of enshitification.

While I was initially skeptical about the pricing changes, the more I learned about it the more I was okay with it. I think part of the initial problem was the talk of annual subscriptions, when in fact it’s much closer to paying for version upgrades. Their new standard licenses have come down in cost from the old perpetual licensing and the price of a version upgrade is only $36.

Your direct play and Picture in Picture issues might be resolved if you enable “Use Native Video Player” in playback settings. That being said, Picture in Picture doesn’t always work properly for me.

Definitely agree they should be split up if possible. Octoprint and Home Assistant are both rather demanding on a Pi, particularly the Pi 3B.

I would however opt to run Pi-Hole on the Home Assistant device as there is a plugin built in for it, and Home Assistant is the kind of thing you would be more likely to leave on at all times.

I haven’t promoted anything illegal. The whole point of applications like Radarr and Sonarr is to manage a video library.

While I would recommend the *arrs applications, Tiny Media Manager will do exactly what you’re looking for. The only downside is that if you want it to grab subtitles for you, then you have to purchase a yearly, but cheap, license.

I wouldn’t recommend most of the cheap Android boxes. Most of the are full of malware. LTT did a video comparing most major Android boxes: https://youtu.be/sdLnieL90d0?si=6nAX8E0d9c4OZXqM

All existing licenses will stay lifetime. Basic and Plus will no longer be sold, but they will still be honoured.

While I personally use Unraid, something similar you can do is use MergerFS and SnapRAID. This will provide you with similar functionality to Unraid, where you can pool your drives together and create a parity disk. Open media vault has easy plugins for both SnapRAID and MergerFS.

You can also use SnapRaid along side MergerFS to provide some data redundancy. MergerFS will allow you to create a parity drive, without requiring all of your drives to be in your typical RAID pool. This way, if you have several drives die, then you can still access whatever data is available on the remaining drives.

This is a great update. I was surprised to find that server switching was much easier on iOS than it was on Android.

I certainly agree that it adds an element of complexity. I had never dealt with anything like this before and had to learn it, but it really is a pretty easy thing to setup.

Jellyfin is generally just as easy to set up for external access. The only thing you really need to worry about is having a dynamic IP. If you have a domain name, then setting up dynamic DNS is quite straightforward.

The only issue I have with people remotely accessing Jellyfin is that you cannot set a total system bandwidth cap. You can set a per stream cap, but that doesn’t help if you have too many people accessing your server at once.

While I have not experienced these issues, it sounds like your problems come from casting your media. Have you tried using a proper Jellyfin client? I primarily access Jellyfin through the Android TV app, or though Kodi, and it has always just worked.

This is my main approach to media. Instead of spending money every month on streaming services, I buy the media I care about. If I have to buy it on Amazon, then I pirate my own copy.

What do you use that allows you to set per app rules?

Your solution isn’t going to hurt anything. It might be overkill, but it will definitely work.

Ultimately, I think you only really need 2 of the solutions you mentioned.

1. A network wide DNS blocker, such as Pi-hole, to catch the majority of ads.
2. A browser ad blocker, such as uBlock Origin, for the rest.