I did, but completely forgot! I haven’t used a local library in years >.<

That’s pretty much what I just recommended aha, 12th gen or higher, or a GPU. Doesn’t have to be a large one either - my GTX 970 could handle Emby transcoding as well as blaze through speech recognition for a local voice assistant

IIRC the free version of Emby doesn’t throttle in any way, you can still have up to 10 concurrent active devices and the only thing you miss out on really is OpenSubtitles. But I’ve recently upped my game with Sonarr and it’s a dream. One day I’ll put my movies into Radarr.

You need any kind of mobo/CPU combo, I’ve heard 12th Gen Intel onwards are as capable of transcoding on the fly as an older GPU so you wouldn’t need both, but if you go older I recommend a GPU as well, just because it gives more flexibility with being able to use hardcoded subtitles without locking up the CPU, and streaming a lower bitrate version of the video if your internet is shit, instead of - again - locking up

For easy certificate management I use NginX Proxy Manager, for media I use Emby and for a domain I use Cloudflare but you can absolutely serve your server with DuckDNS or another DDNS service for free.

I paid about £200 to build my server, with a £30 CPU (Intel i6 3100), free motherboard, £50 PSU and £110 SFF case (rough costs), and holy fuck it’s so much cheaper than any subscription. Electricity is about £3-£5 a year and other costs are optional. I also sourced a GTX 970 for £90 that was more than up to the task of transcoding, but again, if you get a 12th gen you won’t need it.

I just remembered the HDD I started with was a spare (10TB Seagate Barracuda Pro, but I shucked (like shucking for pearls) an external HDD to get it, as I heard that you can get lucky and get a good drive for cheaper than it would cost to buy it. Said eHDD was about £250.

I found one called conduwuit and immediately used that to setup lol

The trick of retrofitting any battery powered device into a wired one is to remove the battery. No matter what, Li-ion batteries cannot sustain permanent power. Expensive adapters and new Androids can regulate power well, as can automations, but the best worry-free option is battery removal.

Edit: I’ve just remembered Fairphone, they’re bossing the mobile repair ability front and have removable batteries like pre-2012. Could get one of those