If high-quality streaming is an issue for your self-hosted media server, there are a few things you can try.

An offline movie library is a wonderful thing, but only if it's smooth as butter.

Hardware transcoding unlike software transcoding, relies on the server’s CPU to convert media files into different formats, hardware transcoding offloads this intensive task to a dedicated component ...

tl;dr is: scrounge up some hardware, preferably on a recent-ish Intel platform with an igpu (i think 8th gen+ is the sweet shot), and then get a slew of storage. Pick a base operating system (I like ...

I'm currently using Plex on my Synology NAS and I quite like it, but the Synology is just not up to the task for anything beyond basic transcoding. So I would like to create a dedicated server to ...

Synology’s DS216Play NAS is a middling performer, but there’s no better NAS box available for streaming multimedia features and 4K transcoding. Synology’s rich app environment allows it to also ...