Docker as mentioned above is great especially if you're going down the homelab rabbit hole. You'll find it really useful to get familiar with for future projects.
Another alternative is to install DietPi. It's an operating system for a raspberry pi. It has all these programs you mentioned with install scripts including docker and installing (and updating) is as easy as checking a box. Also has a pretty good community in case you run into an edge case.
eBay is your friend, Shield came out about 9 years ago so lots on the used market. Also the phoning home for the paranoid can also be handled. Since it's been around for so long there's not a lot left someone hasn't already figured out. Maybe not the perfect answer but worth considering. As a media player it just works and it's tried and true.
Have you looked into maybe getting a shield and changing out the launcher? It's a great emulator and will play any video file thrown at it. Worth looking into if you can't find any sbc alternative.
Ah falling down the rabbit hole. If you're only looking to transcode videos stay away from the graphics card. Look into Intel quick sync. Newer Intel cpus can transcode over a dozen 4k streams at a time using little power. However the next issue depends on what operating system you want to use, Windows, Linux, docker container or proxmox to run Plex/emby/jellyfin. They all come with their own issues/caveats to actually getting quick sync to work. However each is well documented. Learning is the fun part. I went down a similar route ended up with a nuc12pro running proxmox running a whole bunch of stuff but primarily used for Plex running in an lxc container. They are small powerful and don't use a lot of power and importantly also well documented.
Yep alot slower. You can Google it but you aren't the first person to have this problem.
I've seen this issue come up often. Do not use the ethernet connections on the TV as they are frequently 100mbit even on brand new TVs and mostly likely the source of your bottleneck. Either use the wifi or as some suggested an Nvidia shield and hook that up to Ethernet.
I think the best you can do is use pihole with unbound so all dns requests go directly to root servers so no middle man involved. If you have a raspberry pi and use dietpi it is very easy to setup.
I have not tried shucking drives but I imagine they should work. Currently have 20tb Seagate ironwolf ST20000NT001. The script takes two seconds to run and needs to be redone everytime you update the Synology software which doesn't seem to be overly frequent. Running the script or not you have the same full functionality. Script just removes the warnings.
Haha no, I really over did it. Figured it was better to have more then less and even ecc ram is fairly cheap so why not. I eventually wanted to see if it was possible to create a ram disk to run Plex in but I run it and some other *arr programs off the m.2 drives and they are really snappy.
I'm sure you read the same reddit thread I did saying that the xs series only accept Synology drives which is totally incorrect. That being said it will throw up the warning about not using Synology drives or ram but everything works as normal. If the warnings bother you you can run the script from here https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db And the warnings will go away.
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