It displays fine by default, but the image only updates every several seconds. I’m talking about a live video feed, which needs some kind of special frame which has to be bolted onto HA somehow.

I haven’t, that’s the problem. It seems like it’s possible, but I’ve given up trying for the moment.

I have a Reolink PoE camera. It works fine. As far as I can tell, it only uses the internet to check for updates and set the time, but I have it blocked off anyway. Home Assistant was actually causing it to check for updates, too, so that got disabled.
I don’t record, so I can’t help you there.
I will say that is a pain to get Home Assistant to display real-time video instead of a slide show.

Bitwarden Authenticator because Bitwarden seems to have a good reputation. I don’t use their password manager, though.
It does seem faintly insecure that it displays all of the codes at once on one page, but I’m having trouble imagining a scenario where it’s actually a problem.

I have a Reolink PoE camera. It’s plugged into Home Assistant, and some setting in the integration had it phoning home constantly looking for updates. I turned that off and now it only connects outside of my network to sync the time.
The camera has survived outside for a few years now, so no complaints.

Home Assistant for viewing

Heads up: by default, HA does not show real-time, full-framerate video - just a snapshot that updates every 10 seconds or whatever. As with all things open source, there is a way to fix it, but you have to faff around. I haven’t bothered yet, but it’s on my list.

Sonarr + Picard

Do you mean Lidarr? Sonarr is the TV one (confusingly).

CPU-heavy process

Sounds to me like a hardware issue: you’re overheating. Find a way to monitor your temps. I’m not sure how to do this on Linux, so I’m open to suggestions too.

Given pihole’s recent record with updates, I’m not sure I want them firing automatically.

Unfortunately I can’t remember whether I downloaded pihole from some package manager within DietPi, or whether I used the instructions on pihole’s site. It’s not hard either way, it’s really just one package.

I run it for my pi-hole. It’s been great. It tells you when there are package updates when you log in, which I find helpful.

How are you geoblocking?

I know Kodi running the Jellyfin plugin on LibreELEC works great on a Pi. I’m not entirely sure if/how Kodi supports YouTube, but there are so many plugins available it seems like it must.
https://libreelec.tv/

Not the person you were responding to, but I’m quite happy with my DS220+. It’s on 106 days of uptime after a power out. The interface / OS is very friendly. The only downside is the weak processor which makes it inadequate for things like Immich’s AI or heavy Jellyfin use - but you get what you pay for.
Re. lemons; are you sure it was the NAS that had issues or could it have been the drives? Mine is loaded with WD Red drives iirc.

Obsidian synced via git.

I would prefer to have GPUs for under $600 if possible

Unfortunately not possible for a new nvidia card (you want CUDA) with 16GB VRAM. You can get them for ~$750 if you’re patient. This deal was available for awhile earlier today:
https://us-store.msi.com/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-GPU/GeForce-RTX-50-Series/GeForce-RTX-5070-Ti-16G-SHADOW-3X-OC
Or you could try to find a 16GB 4070Ti Super like I got. It runs Deepseek 14B and stuff like Stable Diffusion no problem.

Can’t figure out why you would use Plex over jellyfin

Probably the biggest reason is that it makes it so easy to securely share across the internet. With JF you’re on your own and you can really fuck things up. If you’re just running it on your LAN the JF is the obvious choice.

Everything I hear about Nextcloud scares me away from messing with it.

I’m just running into this now. It also won’t let me log into the web interface. I’m glad I experimented with a second install before upgrading my primary pihole.

I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it’s whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.