Jaypg

An HP Elitedesk mini PC would be small enough to tuck away somewhere and have hardware accelerated transcoding support. Jellyfin recently enabled hardware acceleration for the latest Rockchip boards like the Orange Pi 5 so that’s an option too. If you pre-encode your media into a format compatible with everything you want to stream to then it doesn’t matter, just pick any hardware than can get on your network and run Linux.

Deploy code-server and either connect to it with a VPN or open the port needed to connect over the internet.

I’ve used lots of different boards. The Radxa Rock 3c is cheap and has decent performance, but the official OS support is a bit old. The Libre Computer boards are also good and have Armbian support. Libre Computer is releasing a couple more this year too. BananaPi has good options that aren’t expensive, like the BananaPi M5. Friendly Elec has some boards like the NanoPi R2C and R5C that aren’t pricey and have Armbian support. Any one of these boards are fine for a small home lab. Just boot Armbian, install Docker, and add your containers.