I believe playing with visibility would be the easiest way

Yeah, I was also wondering about the transcoding. And thanks for the power draw comment, great to know. Sounds manageable.

I still think you should give this one a try. Unless, you’re goal is not like having an actual solution, but doing this project as a hobby, and throwing some money at it. Which is also fine, I’ve done the same before.

Testing one or two of these media severs will cost you some hours of your time. Anything other will take much more time, effort and money.

Peripherals are one thing, handling concurrent streams, transcoding… is another one.

So in theory, a Pi can be kept alive with a power bank, but OP is expecting (as I understood) multiple hours of streaming (with “local” only access) , which includes the above tasks for multiple concurrent streams. How big of a power bank we’re talking about and how long will it last?

As others already wrote, I would go with the Plex server at home and using the “Download” feature to have some content available offline for the times you don’t have internet. You can actually set a limit for the size of the download library and individually set video and audio quality for the files.

Seen raspberry pi mentioned some times, I don’t have one, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there would be an easy way to power it up on a train for example.

Can confirm, seen it live. As soon as LogSeq was open on both devices it threw an error.

I have just tried it out for a quite limited time, but ente also looks great.

Definitely not on the cheap side, but maybe you won’t find one: the Hue ecosystem works quite fine for me for years now. I’m just setting up motion sensor and light on the bridge and then they are also discoverable by HA and then setting up automation inside HA. It would work the same with Hue power switch.

Once again, this is more pricey solution, but I’m also building my system gradually, so it’s manageable.