Yeah. To be honest on the DNS side it would probably be far easier to just do a whitelist instead, block everything except your specific service. and yeah, its a stupid amount of work. i hate smart tvs but i’ll be damned if im gonna pay extra for a streaming box =|

just saying its possible

Not sure if you mean hardcoded DNS IPs or hardcoded “phone home” IPs. Hardcoded DNS addresses in devices are annoying, the only way i’ve found to get around that is using destination nat rules (DNAT) which requires more than a consumer router typically. hardcoded phone home IPs would get blocked by your firewall. you’re right that most firewalls are set up by default to implicitly allow outbound traffic. you set up a rule that denies all outbound traffic from the TV, then only allow port 443 (or whatever port your streaming service uses) on the specific IP/IPs that your service uses. Here’s Netflix’s published IP info for example.

edit also i’m fully aware it’s fucking ridiculous that we as consumers have to go through this much rigamarole. you shouldnt have to be a literal network engineer to do something as simple as have a tv that doesnt spy on you.

no it helps to block everything that isnt just netflix or whatever streaming service you use. you combine a DNS adblock along with blocking all the unused ports and it severely limits the communications. you could also add a vpn to add another layer of security. idk about jellyfin but most streaming services i know use https/443 to stream to your tv. so youre only allowing the specific service you want and only on a specific port. buncha great dns blocklists here https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists, and a smart tv specific one for pihole here https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/SmartTV.txt

It’s relatively easy to restrict a smart tv to TLS/HTTPS traffic only using your router and a dns adblocker.

I’m throwing in my vote for CachyOS. Not because it’s the easiest to use (though it isnt difficult imo) but because it works out of the box, then they have nice wiki to guide you through simple things (like using Lutris and Proton). It’s also Arch based so there’s the arch wiki to fall back on also. I ran Windows for 35 years and just switched to Linux in like October, fwiw.

Copilot.

That nvme drive just hanging out next to the power cord is giving me a type of anxiety I never knew I had, thanks.

A smallish (6U) rack mount that you can bolt into the wall. Even if they rip it down it’ll weigh a ton and have locked doors (with ventilation obvi).

It means the same specific subnet. If you have multiple subnets (one for wired, one for wireless for example) it will also trigger that limitation unless you go in and manually tell it hey these are local.

lol crap, it’s the new arch!

You can absolutely run plex in a local only mode. You don’t sign it in to an account and then set your subnets in the local networks section like so. Or leave it blank if you have a standard flat home network.

I bought a plex lifetime pass for $100 over a decade ago and I never see ads like this. I only occasionally get the notice for plex pro week and stuff like that.

They’ve added commercial supported live channels like many other free services but yeah, it’s lacking compared to others. Pluto.tv is my go-to if I want to throw something on at a family members house or something like that. Owned by the networks, reasonably short ads, completely free. Too bad they didn’t figure that out 10 years ago lol.

Having to set up a reverse proxy is basically a non-starter for most people, while I’ve talked extremely non-technical people into running Plex since it just works out of the box.

Plex will do the exact same thing if you have an episode earlier in your history that didnt get marked as “watched”. But plex lets you manually tag episodes as watched which usually fixes it. Maybe there’s a similar option in jellyfin?

Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.

Are you runnin multiple subnets? If so you need to enable them all as local nets in plex or else it’ll trigger this.

worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.

Caveat: I am not a programmer, just an enthusiast. Windows programs typically package all of the dependency libraries up with each individual program in the form of DLLs (dynamic link library). If two programs both require the same dependency they just both have a local copy in their directory.