He/Him They/Them
Working in IT for about 15 years. Been online in one way or another since the late 90’s.
I like games / anime but very picky with them.
Cats are the best people.
The main thing I like about containers is portability. Backup/copy your mounted folder with all the application’s data to any other system, point a new container of the same app to it and you’re up and running.
All the other advantages mentioned already are a really nice bonus.
There isn’t much thinking involved in collections unless you want to make less common ones that span across franchises or something. You can also let jellyfin do it for you but I choose to do it myself.
More commonly you would just make them for related movies or series. For example I have an MCU collection that’s all the marvel stuff (movies and series), and same for Star Wars. Then much more simple ones like Die Hard, which just has 3 movies in it because that’s how many Die Hard movies were ever made.
Do you actually need hardware transcoding for your media is the real question. I haven’t bothered with 4K content so maybe that’s why but I’ve never used a GPU on any media server be it plex since the early days or jellyfin the past few years. Never ran into a situation where I couldn’t play a video file properly on any of my devices.
Are you trying to solve a problem with playback of video content or just want it for the sake of having it? If it’s the later I’d say to not bother especially if your budget is low. At some point you may actually need it at which point you can plan the hardware more appropriately.