BakedCatboy

I always use VLC so I thought the meme was that it was one of those fake "codec not supported, go to this sketchy website" videos

It would be weird if Tesla pushed the envelope on non-standard controls so much that it became the new stick vs automatic. Kids will be like I can't drive your car because I don't know how to use a brake pedal (one pedal driving) or park without the overhead 360 radar thingy. I had a similar thought when I rode with a friend who was so distracted by his phone while driving that he relied on the front collision warning to tell him when to look up from his phone.

I went with the DS1621xs+, the main driving factors being:

• that I already had a 6 drive raidz2 array in truenas and wanted to keep the same configuration
• I also wanted to have ECC, which while maybe not necessary, the most valuable thing I store is family photos which I want to do everything within my budget to protect.

If I remember correctly only the 1621xs+ met those requirements, though if I was willing to go without ECC (which requires going with xeon) then the DS620slim would have given me 6 bays and integrated graphics which includes quicksync and would have allowed me to do power efficient transcoding and thus running Plex/jf right on the nas. So there's tradeoffs, but I tend to lean towards overkill.

If you know what level of redundancy you want and how many drives you want to be running considering how much the drives will cost, whether you want an extra level of redundancy while rebuilds are happening after 1 failure, how much space is sacrificed to parity, then that's a good way to narrow down off the shelf nases if you go that way. Newegg's NAS builder comes in handy if you just select "All" capacities and then use the nas filters by number of drive bays, then you can compare whats left.

And since the 1621xs+ has a pretty powerful xeon, I run most things on the nas itself. Synology supports docker and docker compose out of the box (once the container app is installed), so I just ssh into the box and keep my compose folders somewhere in the btrfs volume. Docker nicely allows anything to be run without worrying about dependencies being available on the host OS, the only gotcha is kernel stuff since docker containers share the host kernel - for example wire guard which relies on kernel support I could only get to work using a user space wire guard docker container (using boringtun) and after the VPN/tail scale app is installed (presumably because that adds tap/tun interfaces that's needed for vpn containers to work.

Only jellyfin/Plex is on my NUC. On the nas I run:

• Adguard

• Sonarr/radarr/lidarr/prowlarr/transmission/overseerr

• Castblock

• Grocy

• Nextcloud

• A few nginx instances for websites

• Uptime-kuma

• Vaultwarden

• Traefik and wire guard which connects to a vps as a reverse proxy for anything that needs to be accessible from the public internet

Just want to second this - I use an Intel nuc10i7 that has quicksync for Plex/jellyfin, can transcode at least 8 streams simultaneously without breaking a sweat, probably more if you don't have 4K, and a separate synology nas that mainly handles storage. I run docker containers on both and the nuc has my media mounted using a network share via a dedicated direct gigabit Ethernet connecting the two so I can keep all the filesystem access traffic off of my switch /LAN.

This strategy was to be able to pick the best nas based on my redundancy needs (raidz2 / btrfs with double redundancy for my irreplaceable personal family memories) while being able to get a cost effective low power quicksync device for transcoding my media collection, which is the strategy I chose over pre-transcoding or keeping multiple qualities in order to save HDD space and be flexible to the low bandwidth requirements of whoever I share with who has a slow connection.

The servarr wiki and the trash guides have a lot of info on what the various pieces do and how to set them up. I didn't strictly follow them but I've browsed them to get ideas on stuff like custom formats and such to get sonarr/radarr to automatically download and upgrade towards the codecs/quality that I prefer.

Personally I run Plex+jellyfin side by side to start, then sonarr/radarr/lidarr to download and organize TV/movies/music, with prowlarr to auto setup torrent sites into sonarr/radarr/lidarr, with a transmission+VPN docker container connected to each of the same 3, and finally an overseerr web ui that my friends can log into to submit requests to be auto downloaded by sonarr/radarr.

It's a lot to set up at once, but I started out with just Plex like 10 years ago and I've slowly added each container as time went on so it's only like a couple weekends a year where I tinker with it or do a migration to a new box as I moved from place to place and had different spaces available for my gear. Start with just a Plex and/or jellyfin server, you can tinker with sonarr/radarr without using it to auto download at the start. It's still super useful for renaming / organizing files, and you can only add certain folders if you don't want it to mess with a collection that you prefer to manually manage. Or create a new junk library folder to let it run amok with until you have it configured to your liking. Add in a torrent+VPN/Usenet downloader container to get it auto downloading when you're ready, and when you get tired of accepting requests personally from friends, an overseerr (for Plex) or jellyseerr (for jellyfin) container they can log into with using their existing Plex/jellyfin login to have their requests automatically forwarded to the appropriate *arr app and you'll have a fully automated low or no touch piracy setup. One of these days I'll also get bazarr up and running to make it easier to grab subtitles too since every once in a while I download something obscure and the only torrents for it dont have subs so I manually grab them from opensubtitles or something. It feels pretty magical though when you've requested a series and throughout the week, you see new episodes just pop up on the recently aired/added row in Plex/jellyfin within an hour or two of the episodes airing.

That's also a great option if you don't need transcoding or tone mapping and can restrict your collection to specific codecs to ensure client compatibility. For my setup quicksync essentially is a requirement since I want to download certain items in the best quality and have remuxes in 4K HDR 7.1 for my own home theater while being able to transcode those items to multiple friends simultaneously and on the fly without needing to keep a separate 1080p copy.

So far I've seen around 7 simultaneous transcodes on my NUC yet the CPU usage stays below 10% because the quicksync is handling all the transcoding while sipping power (another big benefit to using QS over CPU or GPU transcoding).

I can't be bothered to figure out which streaming service it's on. Also my *arr stack is fully automated and shared with ~15 people so the cost per person is very low considering my nas and nuc use ~100W combined, that's $12/mo for 15 people based on my local electric rate. I would gladly put my plex/jellyfin server in the closet and pay for a subscription if I could pay $12/mo to legally watch any show / movie on however many screens I want from wherever I want. But until then, my arrstack is both cheaper for the features and more convenient in content availability.

As a comparison, to subscribe to every major streaming service would be upwards of $90 per month.

Neat, it almost works in sync but it just shows an empty community with an "error loading page" toast

Yep, and even if they managed to block indexers, you can always open up any torrent client with DHT search and find torrents in a fully distributed and P2P way. I used to have magnetico crawling DHT and connected to my *arrstack as a backup so it's pretty straightforward to not rely on any central blockable website for torrents.