If you’re planning to expose a server to a world wide audience Cloudflare is a great choice. However, if it’s just for you and maybe a few selected friends or family members, consider getting a free Zerotier or TailScale account. You’ll have complete control as to who has access.

If you’re downloading movies and they are in a file format that Jellyfin can use, there’s nothing more to do. If not, use Handbrake to transform them into a usable format.

Hop over to the Youtube channel “Jim’s Garage”. Awesome detailed tutorial series for Kubernetes. If your brain cells have been enjoying the quiet life, it’s over, because boot camp is here. It tough going, but it’s worth it.

The two software transcoders I use are, Handbrake and MakeMKV. Of the two, MakeMKV does a really good job and it can tackle Blu-Ray too. Downside, the output files are rather large.

This is where Handbrake comes in. It can really slim down the bloated output from the forma to a more modest size. If you have enough disk capacity, you can skip Handbrake.

Finally, import into Jellyfin. To output to the family TV (not 4K), I’m using a modestly priced Roku streaming device that has a Jellyfin client and it does a pretty good job.

I believe, to achieve 4K you will need to transcode with a GPU.

Currently, I’ve around 520 movies and probably around a 1000 TV episodes on my Jellyfin server, all transcoded mainly from DVDs and some Blu-ray disks I’ve bought.

1st: Virtualization

2nd: Firewalls and networking

3rd: Containers, Docker, (Podman) and LXC, (Incus)

4th: All the above leads onto Hypervisors

5th: Which leads you to Kubernetes

The first three require minimal hardware. Once you’ve got the hang of the them, it’s time to get serious with a dedicated machine with greater hardware resources to run a Hypervisor.

Kubernetes, all that built in redundancy makes it hungry beast. Enough to get you looking for one or more those big old servers that homelabers love.