A few reasons.

1. Privacy, you control your data. It doesn’t go to someone else’s server to sit.

2. Security. It’s on your server. Password managers are primarily targets for hackers, i don’t want to name names, cause I’m not 100% sure of the name. But, one pw manager was hacked like 3x in the past year or something. It’s on your server, you are less likely to be targeted for a huge data breach, and you get to manage your data. Not someone else who fucks up.

3. You can’t be banned, or have the provider suddenly change access to the server, thus losing your data. I will name names here. MyQ garage door opener by Chamberlain suddenly removed the smart home integration, since the whole system ran on their servers. Removing the functionality users paid for. But they don’t own it, so they just got fucked. Your data/service on someone else’s server, is actually their data/service, you are just a visitor.

Direct playback doesn’t require much compute power. Just run Ubuntu server on the pi, spin up the containers, and get a fairly large HDD. An external HDD should be fine.

Any transcoding will be a issue tho. Like, if you use Jellyfin, and it wants to transcode your subtitles (even tho it shouldn’t), you won’t be able to stream anything 😂. I had this exact issue, and it was kinda pathetic that couldn’t get subtitles to stop transcoding. It isn’t transcoding now, but I also have a way more powerful server.

If you want to go more powerful. I’d recommend the build on Wolfgang’s channel, with a N5105 NAS board, the N5105 is strong enough for 4k transcoding. It has 2x nvme, 6x sata, and up to 64gb of ram. Throw it in a decent case. I’d run Proxmox and Ubuntu server on Proxmox, this just makes it easy to backup your VM, in case something breaks and you want to rollback. At which point you can just throw HDDs in, or make them a ZFS pool, or a raid pool. Up to you.

First, I try not to have it owned by root. But some containers have special privileges that need to be followed.

So rsync -O will copy the directory retaining permissions and ownership of all files.

Media server.

You connect your torrent trackers to prowlarr as well as your download clients. Prowlarr automatically adds these things to the rest of the arrs, this way you have a single place to edit and manage your trackers.

Well… Thats a beast.

Proxmox. Run multiple VMs. 2 VMs for ubuntu server, run all your containers through that, perhaps kubernetes? This way if your containers go down, they just switch over. Super nice.

Than with all the extra resources… I mean, home lab for fun. Spin up windows server. Diff Linux distro. Learn arch, etc.

Uh… Ppl are typically running QBitTorrent or deluge, I like qbittorrent but it doesn’t matter. I use a image with a VPN included, but you can run a VPN separately too. Whatever you get working really.

Than you typically run a index manager like jackettt or prowlarr, prowlarr seems to be the most popular these days.

Than you run a few programs, radar, sonarr, reader, there is 1 for music as well, this actually uses the indexer to pull the torrents and put them on your torrent client.

Then you run a media request app, overseer or jellyseerr, probably jelly these days. Which allows you to search and request whatever media you want, which prompts the arts to do there thing, which prompts torrent app to do it’s thing.

Then lastly, you run a media server, like Plex, Jelly, Kodi, or Emby. Whichever you prefer…

If everything runs smoothly, you go to seerr, request media, than a little while later it’s on your media server.

You can add a few things, like ntfy to get notifications when your files are downloaded, or server is updated with the latest file. You can add a VPN to get access to your apps outside of network. Or a wire guard tunnels, to get in, or simply host on a domain.