Your post inspired me to pull my old PS3 Slim off the shelf and give it a shot. Fortunately it is one of the ones capable of custom firmware. I successfully jailbroke it and am now running custom firmware, next I just have to figure out how to do anything useful with it, lol.

Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.

Jellyfin is excellent. You can always just download it and run it on whatever you’re running your existing setup on and give it a try. The server’s available for a bunch of platforms.

I have a regular-ass Amazon Fire TV stick 4k max that I use to play my Jellyfin content. It has native hardware support for h.265. I can’t remember the last time it needed a stream transcoded. Of course, it is encumbered with the Amazon ecosystem, but it was cheap.

I also have one of those $20 Walmart Android TV boxes. The UI is a little slow in it but it plays the same Jellyfin content just fine, and you can replace the stock launcher on it with whatever you want.

Update: I wound up getting one of the Chinese mini PCs from Amazon. $300+tax got me a Ryzen 7 5700U, 32GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe storage, and a single 2.5Gb ethernet port. I can add a second interface via USB-C if necessary. Really not bad at all. I have Proxmox up and running on it already, with PiHole and Jellyfin already running in LXC containers. Jellyfin took a bit of screwing around to get the CIFS shares from my NAS and hardware-accelerated transcoding going, but everything works now!

It was one of the earlier podcasts to blow up huge. It used to be great.

That’s a pretty reasonable ad load. Have you listened to 99% Invisible lately? Each episode is about 10 minutes long, and it seems like at least 50% of it is now ads and sponsorship stuff.