In terms of the tinyminimicro’s I think i5-6500T 7500T or 8500T (T signifies 35w TDP) could all fit your price point depending on RAM/SSD specs. I haven’t done much research on the n100 processors but I think they are broadly comparable to the above i5’s

While I get leaning towards AMD products, I’ve been doing so as well, when I built my first server with a Ryzen 5 2400GE I have found that there just isn’t as much resources/support for enabling transcoding with the vega 11 in Jellyfin or Immich. Most Intel iGPU’s have a hardware chip specifically tuned for transcoding called quicksync that you should strongly consider.

Especially in the $100-200 price range tiny mini micro’s from HP/Lenovo/Dell are widely available and offer lots of capability in a power-efficient (~10-15w idle, 40-50w full load) and easily maintainable form factor. The Lenovo’s in particular are interesting due to a few models having full pci-e slots if you decide later you want a GPU.
Lenovo pci-e

Finally for software I would suggest looking into Cosmos Cloud, I use it and have found it made it so much easier to setup and manage all my docker containers and domain name/reverse proxy settings.

Any Intel CPU with quicksync will likely be plenty transcoding capability for his use case with significantly lower power draw

For the record, pre-merger Boeing pulled the same crap with their rudder hardcover crashes in the early 90’s. Everything from telling NTSB to blame the wrong piece of equipment to blaming the pilots, even to stealing evidence.

https://imgur.com/a/5wcFx8M

If this is your first time trying to selfhost I highly recommend Cosmos Cloud, I’ve been using it for 6 months and it’s made every step of the way so much easier for me. It manages docker containers and has included reverse proxy and security features, with paid option for personal VPN like tailscale.

Most services work perfectly from a catalog of pre-built docker compose files, but Jellyfin I remember I did have to go to the internal docker IP on the actual host machine to set the server up and working properly to be visible from other machines

Bro 2.0 came so fast I didn’t even have time to do 144, like why did they even bother releasing that when 2.0 was coming the very next day lol

Like you ended up doing a PiHole at home? I’m surprised there’s no access control. I was on the verge of setting that or Adguard home up for myself but realized using Adguard’s public servers is effectively the same thing, just without the extra privacy of hosting at home.

I’ve run the duckduckgo version of this for years but only recently found out you can get most of this functionality natively in android (android 13 for me) by setting a private DNS as shown in the below image. My duckduckgo app tracking protection does still catch attempts but it’s basically just google now, instead of dozens of companies before.