The setup, as the author describes it
The author says the laptop has an Intel Core i5-7200U. He moved about 50,000 photos from himself and his wife onto the drive and still had most of the capacity left. With the hardware idle, he added more lightweight services.
The headline says three services, but the body describes more than three tools:
- Jellyfin for streaming a media library.
- *The arr apps** (Sonarr for TV, Radarr for movies, Lidarr for music), plus Bazarr for subtitles and Tdarr for re-encoding. This counts as one "service" in the headline, but it is really several applications.
- AdGuard Home for DNS-level filtering across the home network.
Jellyfin: playback compatibility decides the load
The author set aside 4TB of the 6TB drive for movies and TV. He chose Jellyfin partly because hardware-accelerated transcoding doesn't need a paid tier, unlike Plex, which he says generally wants a Plex Pass for that feature.
Jellyfin's documentation explains why a modest laptop can cope. It lists four playback types, ordered from lowest to highest server load.
- Direct Play sends the file untouched.
- Remux changes only the container.
- Direct Stream transcodes audio only.
- Transcode converts the video.
The client tells the server what it can handle, including codecs, resolution and bitrate. So the same library can be trivial on one TV and punishing on another.
Some Jellyfin documentation details are useful for an older machine like this one:
- Supported hardware acceleration includes Intel Quick Sync, NVIDIA NVENC/NVDEC and AMD AMF. Some pipeline stages can still fall back to the CPU, which means higher load and slower transcoding.
- HDR sources must be tone-mapped to SDR when transcoded. Jellyfin says software tone-mapping is very slow, and a GPU is always recommended, even a basic Intel iGPU.
- Hardware decoding of 10-bit H.264 isn't supported by Intel, NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, so Jellyfin falls back to software decoding. Jellyfin suggests converting such video to 10-bit HEVC.
The author didn't test the i5-7200U against specific files or multiple simultaneous streams. Don't assume a number of transcodes it can handle.
The *arr apps: automation takes planning
Jellyfin can pull metadata and artwork, but it doesn't rename or reorganize the files. That is the *arr apps' job. The author's example turns a scene-style filename into a clean "Family Guy - S04E03 - Blind Ambition.mkv" inside a Season 04 folder. It is an illustration from the article, not a documented test.
Bazarr handles subtitles. Tdarr re-encodes files, which the author says saved hundreds of gigabytes. He gives no figure, so treat that as anecdotal.
Two practical points:
- These tools manage and automate. They don't make a source lawful. The author describes both ripping discs you own and searching configured sources for releases via a download client. What you obtain is your responsibility under the rights and terms that apply.
- Path and permission mistakes are the usual failure. The *arr apps need to reach the download client, see the same folders and have write permission. In Docker, mismatched mounts are a common source of import failures. I couldn't retrieve the Radarr documentation page to confirm the details, so check the Servarr wiki for your setup.
AdGuard Home: useful, but not a privacy guarantee
AdGuard's own overview describes it as a DNS server that sends ad and tracking domains to a "black hole". Set it as your router's DNS and it can cover every device on the Wi-Fi network without client software. That includes smart TVs and other devices where you can't install a browser ad blocker.
The author used it to restrict his smart TVs to a short list of allowed domains after the recent LG TV data-collection controversy. His article gives no router model, test results or evidence of how complete the lockdown is.
He also notes the main limitation: some devices use hard-coded DNS servers and skip your filter. Other writers say the same. Several guides say a device can bypass the filter through:
- its own encrypted DNS (DoH or DoT);
- a VPN or cellular data;
- IPv6 settings handed out elsewhere. One guide advises checking IPv4 and IPv6 behavior, because a router's IPv4 DNS setting may not control every query.
The usual fix is a firewall rule that redirects or blocks outbound DNS traffic. That is more work than setting a DNS address. Treat the filter as one layer. A TV that stops showing up in the AdGuard query log may be going around it, not behaving.
AdGuard's filter policy also warns that filtering can affect how third-party sites and services work. If something breaks after you add a blocklist, check the query log before blaming the app.
The big caveat: a server isn't a backup
The story's starting goal was to keep photos out of the cloud. But one disk in one laptop is a convenient home, not a backup. Immich's own documentation says a 3-2-1 strategy is recommended. It says a full backup needs both your photos and videos and the database, because the database holds file paths and user metadata and Immich doesn't rebuild from scanning the library folder.
Immich's documentation lists these details:
- Automatic database dumps go to a backups folder under your upload location. They hold metadata only, not photos or videos.
- The docs say Immich doesn't handle filesystem backups for you. You need an actual backup tool.
- If you can't stop the server container during a backup, back up the database first and the files second. The reverse order can leave a restored database pointing at missing files.
- The project cautions against making Immich the only copy of your media.
If you want Immich to browse folders you already keep elsewhere, its external-library guide mounts them into the server container. The documented examples use read-only mounts. Remove the read-only flag only if you want Immich to delete files or write metadata sidecars.
Should you copy this?
An idle PC with lots of storage is a sensible starting point, and AdGuard Home is light enough to run on far weaker hardware. A sensible order, based on the documentation above, would be:
- Get Immich running and set up backups before trusting it, with a second copy on separate storage.
- Add Jellyfin and check what your actual devices direct-play before you worry about transcoding.
- Plan folder paths before adding the *arr apps.
- Add AdGuard Home, then check the query log for the devices you care about, especially TVs.
This is one person's report, not a benchmark. Still, it shows how one drive and an old laptop can grow into a small home stack. It also shows that backups and DNS bypass need attention before the stack grows further.