Doubletwist

The only stuff, that’s popular, that I have no opinion on is Babylon 5, mainly because I have not watched any of it

I highly recommend you watch it. Just keep in mind the first season (esp the first half) is tough, some bad dialog and acting. But it has important character and setting development.

The end of season 1 things get better, and by the first few episodes of season 2 you’ll be hooked.

At the end of the day, I bet you’ll acknowledge that B5 has BOTH some of the worst writing/acting you’ll see in a TV show, AND some of the best writing/acting you’ll ever see anywhere.

Mostly in a state of stability at the moment.

I recently migrated off of a pair of ESXi servers, and consolidated down to just put my VMs on my TrueNAS Scale server, primarily to save power and generation so that I would only be running two servers instead of four. It’s not as fancy or flexible, but the VMs run and do what I need.

So now my lab consists of:

• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 1TB HDD in RAIDZ2 - backups (backuppc)
• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 2TB SSD in RAIDZ2 + JBOD w/16x 3TB HDD in 2xRAIDZ2 pool - NAS + VMs for Plex, k8s, ansible/terraform, etc. (TrueNAS Scale)
• Unifi UDMPro + 3APs
• Unifi 10Gb Aggregation Switch
• Unifi 24-port POE switch standard

I then have another pair of R620s, plus 2 more JBOD trays and disks as cold spares. I may run the servers some during the winter, but it’s too hot in the garage closet in the summer to run them all without additional cooling.

Even as someone who has disliked MS since the mid-90s, I am willing to admit they have made some good products. The Intellimouse 2.0 was one of the best mice I’ve ever used. It was my main mouse for something like a decade, and even now, almost 25 years later, it still works as a backup mouse when I need it for something in my homelab.

The problem isn’t 4k vs 1080p. I have a separate library for my 4k items which isn’t accessible remotely.

The problem is twofold:

1. My uplink speeds suck, so often a 1080p file can’t stream remotely without being transcoded down to 720p.

2. Almost everything I have is encoded to x265, and many Roku devices don’t support that, thus causing media to be transcoded even locally. (The device I use for 4k stuff does but other TVs in the house currently use devices such don’t)

Also, I’m not just running this on a raspberry pi with a single disc. I have over 1500 movies, and 200 TV series already taking up over 30 terabytes on a RAIDZ2 server. So it’s not just a simple matter of throwing an " extra fifty bucks" at it.

Frankly, with everything that’s running in my home lab, the added electricity in CPU power to transcode is barely a rounding error.

Is it possible for me to arrange things so that nothing ever needs to transcode? Sure, but it would be far more trouble and cost than it’s worth at this time.

Not everyone has the same needs or restrictions.

That’s assuming you can afford the storage to store multiple copies of your media.