Higher end cable testers can show you where the break is, but it will be far more expensive that a new cable.

Pinhole has allowed custom local records for a very long time now

Like the others, I suggest you stick to a distro designed for desktop use (Ubuntu, Fedora etc), you'll have a much easier time.

If you really want to go with something closer to "scratch made" I'd recommend Arch. Its documentation is killer and you can build a system suited to your requirements.

SmarterEveryDay explains it better than I ever could.

https://youtu.be/RtWbpyjJqrU

The way I justify self hosting is that every device I use it on has an offline backup so downtime isn't overly important.

It is paid for, with your time ;)

I use Arch because it makes installing almost any software package trivially easy via the AUR and if you run into issues, the wiki is there to help.

It depends how valuable your data is, what backup strategy you have, and how long you're prepared to wait to get access to your data when a drive fails.

Personally if/when I migrate my main dataset to SSD, I'll stick with RAIDZ2/RAID6.

Transcoding 4K isn't as hard as you think. I used an i5-9500T and the iGPU could easily transcode ~80GB 4K Blu-ray rips at double real time speed. I've now switched to software transcoding on a 5800x and it also exceeds real time speed.

Arch, nothing beats the availability and ease of installing packages from the AUR

I like VueTorrent

https://github.com/WDaan/VueTorrent

I've seen a few people recommending paperless-ngx

My method to get around this is setting up a specific user account for my TV. In the user options you can disable transcoding

I'm not very familiar with that software, what features does it have that you want to use?

I came to Arch for the customisation, I stayed for the AUR

You should try out KDE in a Live CD. The snapping and tiling features work very well, Windows needs to catch up

That might explain the problem. Assuming adguard returns an nxdomain for blocked sites then the devices will try with their secondary DNS server and get to the blocked site

There are quite a lot of h265 HDR rips available now, particularly for newer series released on Netflix etc. They definitely support full 10bit HDR and look good to my eyes.

Your adguard config looks strange. The examples shown list different DNS providers but you have pointed it back at itself for its DNS. I don't understand why you would do that.

I have a similar setup using Truenas to store data. I've setup a VM in Truenas that can access the data via NFS (easier to setup on Linux than SMB).

It's nice to keep all your services contained in one machine, as long as it has enough resources, and will probably consume less power than running another PC.

I use qbittorrent, most people seem to agree it performs better than Transmission. It's accessible from a web interface.