4 currently with 8GB RAM and no pass through for transcoding (only direct play)

That’s a good point; My Virtualization server is running on a (fairly beefy) Intel NUC, and it has 2 eth ports on it. One is for management, and the other I plug my VLAN trunk into, which is where all the traffic is going through. I will limit the connection speed of the client that is pulling large video files in hopes the line does not saturate, and long term I’ll try to get a different box where I can separate the VLAN’s onto their own ports instead of gloming them all into one port.

I typically prefer VM’s just because I can change the kernel as I please (containers such as LXC will use the host kernel). I know it’s overkill, but I have the storage/ memory to spare. Typically I’m at about 80% (memory) utilization under full load.

Yeah, I’ve been looking into it for some time. It seems to normally be an issue on the client side (Nvidia shield), the playback will stop randomly and then restart, and this may happen a couple times (no one really knows why, it seems). I recently reinstalled that server on a new VM and a new OS (Debian) with nothing else running on it, and the only client to seem to be able to cause the crash is the TV running the Shield. It’s hard to find a good client for Jellyfin on the TV it seems :(