I do have radio but I’m lazy and haven’t gone to get a retransmitter. I find the act of burning CD’s kinda fun anyway, and they sound better.

I burned an audio CD just last week. My old Chevy truck has some mid 2000’S radio swapped into it and it doesnt have bluetooth or aux (well, has aux but it’s buried in the back of the dash). So I burn a CD once in a while to pop in and enjoy.

A Minecraft server is the classic.

Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).

Yup. Close to lossless 480 will always look infinitely better than a poorly encoded 720/1080/4k. Compression blocks ruin images INSTANTLY.

Its why NTSC analog tv was always just Enough.

The only file format that pretty much 100% guarantees support on most media hardware is h.264 in MP4 containers. With some encoder tuning you can make them decently small without loss of fidelity; people will notice bad encoding more than they will a slight loss in pixels. I would focus on making a really high quality 720p copy of the shows ans batch encoding them with handbrake (or finding good encoded copies on the usual places)

There are many independent small indie games, many DRM free, for less than $20 on steam. What kind of games do you play if any?

1gb ram is crap. Hardware capabilities aside it’s just not enough to run anything usable for real hosting. Get an old office machine for 50-100 with 8gb or more of memory and it will do infinitely better.

Oh thank god. This solves my problem of no good integrated cam hardware on the market that isn’t cloudified or a huge security hole.

When I was in college, often yes, as the “free” thing was typically a textbook I needed to actually pass a class.

Nowadays? Meh, I probably don’t need that random movie that bad. I have so little time for entertainment that if I can’t get it from a torrent site in a few minutes I just find something else.

me when i am in a “build an unusuable standard” competition and my opponent is “literally any consumer electronics manufacturer”

Ethernet over HDMI does exist as a standard, but iirc it requires the device manufacturer on both ends of the cable to have a special implementation, and also requires a special cable that has the Ethernet data lanes included. I’m not sure any modern displays implement it anymore, it kinda died because it sucked and wasn’t that useful.

And at significantly lower transmit power too. Ubiquiti 5ac ptp rigs use like 8w, 802.11ah can make a link with under a watt. Sure it won’t be fast at all but if you’re doing a remote embedded device on a solar panel, it makes a huge difference.

That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.

Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you’ll discover what you’re real hardware needs are.

When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.

Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it’s an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.

service still up = no problem
Can’t access service = problem, better ssh in

Simple as

A. Run a batch transcode with Handbrake and make all your stored files compatible with your end players.
It sounds like the more recent things you are downloading are in a codec that is not compatible with your playback devices. E.g, older torrents are frequently an H.264 stream in an MP4 container, which practically every device can play now. Many modern releases are being distributed in H.265 or AV1, as they have significant size and quality benefits, but many older devices don’t support them natively. so it is forcing Jellyfin to live transcode to h.264. Find out what older titles play without any buffer or playback lag/high CPU usage and check what codec those files are in. That is what you’ll need to batch encode everything over to.

B. Sounds like you are still relying on CPU transcoding which is absolute dog. What mini pc specs do you have? If it’s an AMD or Intel CPU/APU then it should have hardware encode/decode included in it’s integrated GPU. When using hardware transcoding the CPU load is generally minimal for 1 to 2 streams. See the Jellyfin docs on hardware acceleration here.

My default goto with any stability issue is to first force a new drive self test

smartctl -l selftest /dev/nvme0  

And then I would also run a complete extended memory test (memtest86) to ensure bad ram isn’t doing something dumb like corrupting the part of the kernel that handles disk IO. The number of times I’ve had unsolvable issues that traced to an unstable stick of memory is… Surprisingly high.

If the memtest passes try fsck’ing nvme0, if there are corrupted blocks yeah it’s possible the SSD is dying but the controller isn’t reporting it.

Actually I think I meant to write “arent worth shit” but had a tired brain fart

Black Friday sales aren’t shit anymore, I waited until last black Friday and no good drives ever went on more than like $5 discount.

With all drives being imported and tarriffs in the US being a total shitshow you should buy ASAP.

Adapter or caddy is fine. Can get them on most shopping sites for cheap.

IIRC from my old office PC slinging days, a lot of those cases with 5-1/4 bays usually had slots for mounting screws that would allow you to mount a 3.5 drive flush to one sideusijg 2 screws. Then you get a 1-3/4" 6-32 screw stand off, thread it into the drive, and use that to mount it to the other side of the 5-1/4 bay.

Did that a lot to really old reused cases where there were a ton of 5-1/4 bays but only one 3.5 bay.