Not bad for a time travel episode. I feel like these have a better shot at working with the episodic format. I was relieved when the car chase scene turned out to be more of a reasonable speed thread the needle through cramped city center streets rather than some over the top Bay schlock; I was sure it was going to be schlock when he chose the flashy red sports car.

I've had mostly good luck with lower end NUCs. I say mostly because of 3, one died a hard and abrupt death after 2 years; but the other 2 have been fine going on 2 years now. The only problem with NUCs in general is they tend to be over priced. If you can find them on sale they are totally worth it. As others have pointed out, you should have a plan for more storage. Personally I've found a good usb hub and some external disks work great for what I do. As to why I like them: 1) form factor, low profile cube, 2) they happily run headless, 3) hardware seems to be of decent quality (ignoring my i3 box that never turned back on after a reboot), 4) most models have enough I/O to fit your needs.

Op is taking about a standard definition release on blue ray, not the full upscale job the article is talking about. An SD re-release onto a larger medium is probably the best we can expect to get, but I'm doubtful even that will happen when looking at studios behavior

I was also choosing between seafile and nextcloud for a syncing and sharing solution. The no host access to files was a deal breaker for me. Having settled in with nextcloud for a year I would say it's still worth a test drive. The web ui is sluggish, but syncing seems fine. It definitely hits the ceiling for read/write speed in my environment, and the windows app picks up changes in the sync directory in seconds. I haven't methodically tested how long it takes for a change made on Android to propagate to the PC, but going on memory from real world use it would be a few minutes at most.

DNS over tls/https is quite handy, especially if it's pihole with ad blocking doing the DNS. This is nice to run on a vps since they're typically very WAN accessible, which you probably want if you're pointing your mobile phone at it. Be warned though, you absolutely should not expose a naked pihole (or any regular DNS server) to the internet; it will be used for DNS denial of service attacks in no time.

Yeah, not sure on audio quality. To my ears DVD audio is already in the realm of diminishing returns unless the mastering was done very poorly. No clue if they were doing 5.1 or any sort of multi channel on the DVD releases either.

The better quality because of more room for higher bitrate makes sense assuming they still have the final cuts pre-dvd-compression laying around. This could get you some crisper, less artifacty output.

But this is also just speculation on my part. I've never checked out one of these sd-bluray-re-releases myself.