MakeMKV has worked well for me. I was using it on a 10 year old PC until I recently upgraded.

You’re correct. The Fire Stick would be a client. I currently use a Pi 4 as my server and it works great, but I use KODI instead of jellyfin. This means that nothing trys to transcode when I use it. However, my brother is able to connect to my server through Tailscale and he does some sort of GPU pass thru with a jellyfin container and as far as I know it works great.

If you’re looking for mini PC recommendations, I have been very happy with my Beelink Ser8. It was chosen specifically for handbrake encoding and is an order of magnitude faster than my underpowered decade old desktop.

Edit. I just reread your post saying that you don’t want to buy a mini PC so disregard that advice but if you want to stream to TVs on a budget, I am a big fan of the Fire Stick. If you get them on sale, they’re usually available for half the listed price (about $25 when I got them). You can get them on ebay if you don’t want to support Bozos. Currently they’re very easy to configure and they work great as long as you can get over the clunky menu design.

You may want to check out https://www.thewebernets.com/ blog posts. I use some of the recommend setups for my movies and most look great, but I do use subtitles which I think he mostly skips in his setups.

I am just some rando but I think this poster may have meant tinymediamanager as opposed to tinymusicmanager. I use tinymediamanager and it’s great.

Spout nonsense with enough confidence and you can wield unimaginable power. Am I talking about LLMs or president poopy pants?

Mine was in the Athens/Acropolis area.

SmartTubeNext has been working fairly well for me for like 5 years or something. It’s super easy to side load on a Fire stick.

A few bad actors can undo the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. I genuinely don’t know if the problem is solvable if it requires cooperation of the entire species. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

I’m doing something similar with KODI and. NAS currently. I’m curious to know if you set up a MySQL database to sync your watch history across devices? I have been reading up on it but since my NAS is just a portable USB HDD plugged into my router, I don’t think I can include this option.

Best part is how we went down the exact same path 100 years ago and learned absolutely nothing from it.