Don’t forget to think about how to keep the salt air from corroding the electronics. Either build a spare or two that you keep sealed in plastic, or find an airtight case with an integrated heat sink or something.

Edit: you might want to look into conformal coating and dielectric grease (for the connectors) as well, although I don’t know enough about that to competently give advice beyond the mere suggestion.

I really don’t need this and I don’t get their appeal [of RGB].

It costs manufacturers pennies to include but gives them an excuse to mark the price up by dollars, so every single one of them shoves it down all our throats.

Well, let’s see:

• You no longer have to set jumpers to “master” or “slave” on your hard drives, both because we don’t put two drives on the same ribbon cable anymore and because the terminology is considered kinda offensive.

• Speaking of jumpers, there’s a distinct lack of them on motherboards these days compared to the ones you’re familiar with: everything’s got to be configured in firmware instead.

• There’s a thing called “plug 'n play” now, so you don’t have to worry about IRQ conflicts etc.

• Make sure your power supply is “ATX”, not just “AT”. The computer has a soft on/off switch controlled through the motherboard now – the hard switch on the PSU itself can just normally stay on.

• Cooling is a much bigger deal than it was last time you built a PC. CPUs require not just heat sinks now, but fans too! You’re even going to want some extra fans to cool the inside of the case instead of relying on the PSU fan to do it.

• A lot more functionality is integrated onto motherboards these days, so you don’t need nearly as big a case or as many expansion slots as you used to. In fact, you could probably get by without any ISA slots at all!

The other major problem I’ve ran into, is that HAOS assumes that you would have no need to run any other Docker services other than those that are add-ons or Home Assistant itself.

With the caveat that I can tell just from your post that I certainly know way less about this stuff than you do, HAOS’ assumption seems pretty reasonable to me. Isn’t the point of using HAOS (as opposed to installing HA some other way) that you’d be either (a) using it by itself on bare-metal hardware, or (b) using it in a VM? I’m running HAOS and Docker in two different VMs on Proxmox, and it’s working fine for me so far.

(The first complaint you mentioned, about reverse proxies and subpaths, sounds a lot more legitimate. In fact, that’s something I’d like to learn more about because I haven’t yet figured out how to make my HA install – or anything, for that matter – accessible outside my LAN and “Tailscale Funnel” sounds intriguing.)

Doesn’t that just mean the clients (running Kodi) need to have all the right codecs installed themselves? If that’s an option, then Jellyfin wouldn’t need to do any transcoding either.

The advantage of Jellyfin is that the client apps can run on things like Rokus where you can’t install Kodi and/or that have limited codec support.

I think the solution is to get hardware-accelerated transcoding set up correctly.

Either that, or maybe bulk-transcode all your media outside of Jellyfin and then add it all back as alternate versions and hope Jellyfin is smart enough to choose the best supported version automatically?

(I’m in the process of setting up a Jellyfin server and noticing the same issue with some of my media.)