Thanks, yeah my Mac will be a dedicated machine for this setup. Do you think I should keep sonoma on it (obviously that’s an issue as far as my goal of going all-FOSS) or install proxmox/ another Linux distro?

Thank you, I’ll look into VPS, that’s new territory for me.

Re transcoding on Jellyfin. Yes that’s something I have considered. A lot of my media is x265 10-bit 1080p stuff, decent quality but not huge lossless blu-ray rips. I stick to encodes that are about 4-8gb a movie. Clients connecting to the server are a couple of laptops and two smart tvs using the native Jellyfin apps. So far I’ve only run into issue with things like AV1 files or very large 4k rips that won’t play on smart tv, mkvs play fine.

Thanks for the reply. Regarding pi-hole on WiFi, I can connect the laptop via LAN with a usb adapter. So that may mitigate that issue