Does turning off subtitles at the settings level avoid this? Like if I turn subs off for all users will it stop it?

Yeah mine is a Broadwell i7, 3.1ghz with boost up to 3.4ghz, model number 5557U. The guy I bought it from maxed out the specs at launch and I bought pretty cheap a few years ago. For a ten year old device it runs like a dream and handles pretty much anything short of gaming and video editing with ease

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.

KDE user here. Never used gnome, why is it an issue?

This is a good idea honestly, I’ll consider it!

Thanks for the super-informative post :) I’ve had a look around some more machines and there’s some i3’s in the mix too. Think I’m going to try Mint xfce on one of them and see if it copes. Yeah, consolidating ram seems like it should be a priority. There are a few i3 machines sitting headless gathering dust on the floor, they seem like a good place to scavenge from