I tried disabling encoding which work for some clients, but for clients that don’t support direct stream like the web interface or the official app that isn’t enough.

All my media is MKV and it still does that, that’s one of the main reasons why I want to upgrade

I have to agree with such websites; every time I try to encode a movie in Jellyfin on my Pi 5, every service I host there freezes for a few moments.

I haven’t bought any hardware yet, this is just what I am currently planning to purchase.

I’m kinda cautious about purchasing second-hand stuff from the internet, especially stuff like that. Any tips on how to approach that?

and others come with RAM, CPU, Storage, etc.

But won’t that just cost way more than building it myself?