Showstopper in the sense that it may not play natively and require transcoding. While x264 has pretty much universal support, AV1 does not… at least not on some of my devices. I agree that it is a good encoder and the way forward but its not the best when using older devices. My experience has been with Chromecast with Google TV. Looks like google only added AV1 support in their newest Google TV Streamer (late 2024 device).

Absolutely, whatever works for you. I think its awesome to use the cheapest hardware possible to do these things. Being able to use a media server without transcoding capabilities? Brilliant. I actually thought you’d probably be able to get away with no transcoding at all since 1080p has native support on most devices and so does h264. In the rare cases, you could transcode beforehand (like with a script whenever a file is added) so you’d have an appropriate format on hand when needed.

AV1 is definitely a showstopper a lot of the time indeed. H265 I would expect to see more on 2k or 4k content (though native support is really high anyway). My experience so far has been seeing transcoding done only becuase the resolution is unsupported when I try watching 4k videos on an older 1080p only chromecast.

This looks cool but having the shell feel good on a TV is one thing, having apps is another. If I open Firefox on theat thing, am I going to see the same app as I do on desktop… only 10 feet away? I immediately asked this after I saw VS Code in the screenshot there because what is the point in having an accessible 10 foot UI to use it to launch an app where I won’t be able to read the menus and navigate around in an accustomed fashion?

I’m skeptical that you are doing much video transcoding anyway. 1080p is supported on must devices now, and h264 is best buddies with 1080p content - a codec supported even on washing machines. Audio may be transcoded more often.

Reolink cameras, cloud not required. Poe is perfect, but wifi works too if you don’t have a central NVR (since it won’t be constantly streaming). Right now, i have them set up to record on motion to their internal sd card and upload to my own ftp server. I dont require 24/7 recording so this works well for me. If you do need it, have an nvr and poe connected cameras and thats pretty much it. My setup allows me to access the video files however i want, the stream however i want and have no third party cloud provider.

My ip updates maybe once every three months or so, but what i did was just write a script that checks the current ip and updates the domain registrar. My domain is on cloud flare, and they have an API through which I can do it. It’s literally one POST request. There are solutions out there but I wanted a really simple solution I fully understand so I just did this. Script runs in cron every few hours and that’s it.

TP link EAP’s and i run the omada software controller on an existing server. Right now I have 3 AP’s and it’s been a great experience so far compared to running consumer wifi routers before. All are on ethernet too.

I generally do this over ssh every week, today was special. Indeed, update always!

Raspberry pi is power limited. HDD creates a power spike on boot as well so you may have power issues. When i used a rpi for a media server, i had to use a 25W supply. Even 20W wasnt enough and i had voltage throttling issues. 1TB HDD probably wont draw that much power but SSD is never an issue. If you dont need space and are on a budget SSD is the way to go. This is all assuming USB is used for power.

If you need large amounts of space and have a budget, use an HDD but it needs to be self powered or used with a larger device like a mini pc which has adequate internal power.