When I initially set up my media server I went with Jellyfin over Plex mostly because the idea of having to create an account on an external service to use software I was hosting myself rubbed me the wrong way. Since then the more learn about Plex the more baffled I am that anyone chooses to use it at all.

My favorite is when someone responds with this but any cursory search to “educate yourself” delivers information that overwhelmingly opposes what they were saying.

“Educate yourself (using only fringe websites that I agree with).”

I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.

There are a few options there.

As someone else mentioned if you’re using IPv6 then it doesn’t matter, you’re already routing internally even if you’re using the public DNS name, no extra work required.

All the rest are for IPv4.

If you’re not behind CGNAT some routers/gateways are also smart enough with their routing to recognise when they need to route back to their own external IP and will loop back locally instead of making any hops out to the internet. Again, if this is the case for you then no additional work is required other than perhaps running a traceroute to confirm.

Another option is to add a local DNS entry for the name you’re using to resolve to a local IP address instead of your public address. The complexity (or even possibility) of this is going to vary considerably with your setup. If you’re running your own local DNS e.g. pihole or similar then it’s trivial. This is how mine is set up.

If all your clients are going to be on PCs (or devices you have more than the typical manufacturer allowed modicum of control over) then you can do something kind of like the previous, just with all your local hosts files.

If none of the above are options, then you’ll unfortunately have to fall back on using a local name/address, which means a slightly different client setup for devices you use exclusively in your home versus ones you might use elsewhere.

Traffic for a local Jellyfin server should definitely not be going over the internet. Also any reasonably modern client should be able to direct play most media without transcoding.

As for my own Jellyfin setup, one TV has an Nvidia shield plugged in and is using the standard Android TV client. The other is a Samsung smart TV onto which I have side-loaded the Jellyfin Tizen app.

A temporary one that you’re expected to remove as soon as you’ve created the admin user(s) you need, but yes. It should only be there during initial setup and ideally removed before the server is ever exposed to the internet.

Same setup here, two USB drives dangling from my NUC. One of them is even notably slow for a USB drive. Still not an issue at all for home use. I’d probably need a dozen or more people all watching different things on Jellyfin at the same time before it even approached being a problem.

The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.

That tracks with my experience as well. Literally every single Seagate drive I’ve owned has died, while I have decade old WDs that are still trucking along with zero errors. I decided a while back that I was never touching Seagate again.

I used to work with someone who would order a caramel macchiato then pour an absolutely astonishing amount of extra sugar into the drink. He probably didn’t reach the level of 100+ additional grams, but it was a lot.

There isn’t much difference at all. Neither should have a cap.

Data moving across a network doesn’t have any per-unit cost to the people operating the network. Whether you use 5TB or 5GB doesn’t impact the bottom line of the ISPs at all.

The only justification for a data cap would be if they’ve overprovisioned their network and sold too many people plans that are too fast for their network to support, so they need to disincentivise people from actually using it. Even then that’s pretty shaky justification.