At the same time, I hate Apple the least of big tech, since they actually do give a crap about building good products and have done quite a bit of that.
That's an incredibly low bar. There are exceptions of course but I'd argue there really is no need to use "big tech" software much of the time. Smartphones are probably the most challenging, but desktops and laptops? Easy to avoid.
They might mean it's happening even with requests routed through the VPN.
~~Look at mini-PCs like the Lenovo Tiny series. These can be had for very little on the used market, and don't use much power (<10W typically, although I don't have any mechanical HDDs in mine).~~
EDIT: Obviously missed that you meant just a single device for everything. SFF PCs usually have a few SATA slots, and their power usage and price on the used market isn't too bad.
I suspect the delay would still be longer than a Youtube like implementation which may need to switch transcodes multiple times, but that's probably unrealistic at this point anyway.
Transcoding everything to AV1 could be a solution too, since high resolutions can look quite good at low bitrates, so you could limit it to 5mbps or 10mbps for any resolution and be done with it. But I'm not sure Jellyfin supports that, and at least from the UI it doesn't give you particularly fine grained control over resolution/bitrates. Perhaps having a secondary library of just AV1 transcodes that you handle manually (perhaps even using a software encoder) could be an option for some.
The client side is also an issue, with not that many devices supporting hardware decoding (although I've found it's fast enough in software with most modern smartphones at least).
Of course. Youtube and the like "pre-transcode" it so that would be one way for Jellyfin to better solve it, at the cost of a significant amount of disk space.
Maybe Jellyfin, where I believe you can force a low bitrate for every remote client. It wouldn't be "adjust to internet speed" but you could minimise buffering that way.
Now we just need to convince them that cars are unsafe due to wokeness.
Except for ipv6 (usually). Although most routers will block incoming traffic anyway by default.
having them VPN into shit is a hurdle that none of them are going to overcome.
If you have a lot of people connecting, then that's fair. But setting up a VPN for one or two households isn't hard. Even easier if you use Tailscale (apparently, never tried it myself).
Sites that have discussions almost always have useless search functions. Using site: on those would likely give you better results then searching globally (even if it takes multiple searches).
I hope to see Jellyfin support this too (Plex is already getting support apparently) and hopefully it will work desktop-to-desktop and not just between streaming devices and phones.
Although it's probably not massively needed as Jellyfin can already control remote devices.
Just to add to the other comments, you probably want to use a wildcard cert so you don't need to individually certify each subdomain (or expose them at all).