I avoided transcoding by making sure to only host videos compatible with all clients. Also, I will spend the time to reencode codes that are too large for my taste. Which happens after a rip of uhd disks.

H265 with slow preset really works wonders for non-grainy film. AV1 is what you have to use when there is grain.

Tailscale is what I do. If you make an exit nice they can forever stay on your VPN… I think…

Yes, I have run wires to a few rooms, but not everywhere and it can be difficult to convince myself to continue down this path. However, it is the more affordable option.

You mean run wires?

While not really for my hosting, I want to upgrade the Wi-Fi speeds in my home, currently running an eero setup that provides good coverage, but the speed seems poor when transferring large files around the home.

Not sure what to get, but this is my goal.

Yes.

Use a custom launcher. I use Flauncher as my home page so it only has jellyfin visible. No ads ever.

You can theme Kodi to look pretty close to Netflix, but not out of the box. As my library doesn’t update too often, I can live with the slower refresh as it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make for the ability to play everything in my library.

Really, for the moat compatibility, a PC with a wireless keyboard is going to 100% of the time work with subtitles.

I switched to Kodi on my Chromecast 4K to fix most of my video playback issues. However, I still have a few cases where Kodi can’t decode the subtitle track, so I use subtitle edit to extract out the srt. Also, getting Kodi to always play subs is tricky, so I remapped the up key on the remote to always enable subs.

Kodi is also slower to show library updates on start, maybe a minute or so later and then it’s don’t with the sync. Maybe I didn’t setup something correctly… Anyway, give it a try. On my Sony with google tv the jellyfin app is great.

Have you tried Kodi?