Yes, a used PC can work great for a home server. Just don’t go too old or it will be power hungry. Obviously you will want one with an integrated GPU to save power too. If you want to run jellyfin, make sure it supports hardware video encoding, preferably AV1 or H.265.

Any Japanese made surround sound receiver and speakers than you can pick up from a thrift store or craigslist will sound way better than the modern junk. It will have a big, heavy power transformer and linear amplifiers. There will be no internet connected spyware either. If you find one from the 90’s, it will likely have a phono preamp for your record player too.

Did they ever fix the GPIO issue?

I hope lots of people will post videos of them destroying the listening devices in interesting ways.

The majority of their users are bots, which don’t care how they are treated.

Be sure to use constant quality mode too. Set the RF to around 16-18 for SD video when using x264 or x265. The lower you set it, the higher the quality is.

The latency of RAM has been around 10ns for the last couple decades. The latency of a good NVMe SSD is about 1000 times worse than RAM.

It wasn’t that long ago when RAM had similar transfer speeds.

With PCIe 6, consumer grade SSDs shouldn’t need more than a single lane. That will be nice since AMD and Intel have been pretty skimpy with the PCIe lanes lately.