If you’re looking for more tinkering on the music around the house front, Lyrion music server + squeezelite players can be a very fun endeavor. I think it gets a little sketchy if you’re favoring automation and casting, but as a network of players that will utilize a wide swath of hardware, it shines. I had a bunch of pi4s laying around and eventually repurposed them all into a multiroom audio gang.
This isn’t a complete solution, but trakt.tv covers a lot of ground. I started using it for getting a consistent history of watched shows between jellyfin on the road and kodi at home. It works okay enough for this, though at times it does seem that one or both of the plugins can fail to log a watched show. I would guesstimate a 90% success rate.
My favorite open secret of the internet. It’s crazy to think how long that network has been running. I think I stumbled on it around 2003. Thanks for pointing out this client. I’ve been relying on a rickety container build that uses novnc and nicotine+ to give a quasi-portable experience. It will be nice to ditch that, hopefully.
If you have the time to spare (a few weeks perhaps, if coming from zero) to experiment and read, Prometheus and Grafana offers a lot and can be really flexible. I use a pretty simple bash script that scrapes my desired https endpoints and writes out the results to a file Prometheus (node-exporter) understands, and from there I can write alert rules in Grafana to fire off notices by email or slack.
I did a 4 node Pi4 kubernetes cluster for about 5 years. The learning experience was priceless. I think most notable was learning to do proper multiarch container builds to support arm and x86_64. That being said, about half a year ago I decided to try condensing it all into two n100 nuc-like clones and keep one pi as the controller. For me and my apps and use cases there was no going back. Performance gains were substantial and in this regard I think I was hobbling myself after the educational aspect plateaued.
There have been a few mentions of Navidrome. I find it works well for sharing at an album or even artist level. It can do playlists as well. But you must explicitly choose what to share, at which point it’s generates a unique URL and will generate a web player and zip if you enable the option to download.
You can, of course, just make user accounts and distribute credentials.
If you’re needing to offer browsable folders to easily copy, basically a filesystem-like experience, it’s probably not the best tool.
Edit: one more thing to point out is that navidrome, jellyfin, and airsonic all construct music libraries differently. Navidrome is using tags, jellyfin uses file names, airsonic uses directory structure. Not sure about Plex.
I’ve had a good experience so far with two minipcs, mele quieter 4c for kodi, and a morefine m9 (I think this one is branded as mipowcat in the EU). They’re both n100, the m9 can go up to 32gb of ram although it is picky about what modules it will accept. I use the m9 for jellyfin and about 10 other services. Quick sync works great as far as I’ve tested it. For jellyfin I’m relying mostly on direct streaming, but I tried a few episodes with forcing some transcoding by using Firefox for playback and it worked fine.
I feel like the argument for using a nonstandard ssh port these days is that you dodge the low tier automation/bots that are endlessly scanning IPs and port 22 and trying obvious usernames and passwords. I do also question how much it is worth dodging these since presumably you’d have already done the other basics like key only and no root login before this. Maybe there’s some value if you want a clean auth.log or equivalent
To add to this, there’s even the capacity to add usb dacs if the underlying distribution supports it. Picoreplayer was my introduction to these tools and I’m pretty sure it’s my final destination. Can’t recommend it enough if they have the time and curiosity to get it set up.
I would also add that if the person OP is asking on behalf of is not so inclined to get into the technical parts and okay with possibly throwing money at the project, volumio is there. I tried this first and appreciated it for what it was, but I wanted features behind the pay wall which are readily available for free with pCP.
I expose jellyfin to the internet, and some precautions I have taken that I don’t see mentioned in these answers are: 1) run jellyfin as a rootless container, and 2) use read-only storage where ever possible. If you have other tools managing things like subtitles and metadata files before jellyfin there’s no reason for jellyfin to have write access to the media it hosts. While this doesn’t directly address the documented security flaws with jellyfin, you may as well treat it like a diseased plague rat if you’re going to expose it. To me, that means worst case scenario is the thing is breached and the only thing for an attacker to do is exfiltrate things limited to jellyfin.