Something like Immich or PhotoPrism is probably the way to go.

Have you considered TrueNAS Scale?

In case your Lenny client concatenates the dot to the link like mine: https://medium.com/@joshuaavalon/encode-video-with-handbrake-on-server-17b6127f6ac7

How much effort have you actually put into trouble shooting the issue? Maybe it is just a wrongly set CPU governor (performance, instead of ondemand or something else)? Or a certain kernel flag that have to be set on boot?

I just wish NewPipe would open piped.video links automatically.

Hm, you could set up a virtual machine on whatever host OS and have Unraid run in that instead.

Honestly, when Unraid is the culprit, why not change that instead?

Does a PiKVM to enter the password manually count?

Modern Android versions can use DoH (DNS over HTTPS) which can not be intercepted. If you don’t have this option or are not sure how to configure it, you could use the Quad9 app to enable secure DNS. This way you can make sure it is not related to DNS. Frankly, I can’t imagine they are blocking the IPs of the DuckDNS servers directly.

If it’s just a DNS block, you could use a different DNS server. You should do this anyway in my opinion.

I’ve heard good things about https://www.tarsnap.com/ and https://www.rsync.net/