Ro

Mini PC, and it is not close once you said transcoding.

A used office machine with an 8th gen or newer Intel chip, or a new N100 box, gives you QuickSync. That handles four or five simultaneous 1080p transcodes without the fan even noticing. The Pi 5 has no usable hardware encoder for this job, so every transcode is software, and one 1080p software transcode will eat the whole board and still stutter.

Money wise: a small office desktop with 8GB and a modest SSD goes for 90 to 130 depending on how patient you are, which leaves room for a drive. A Pi 5 plus NVMe hat plus SSD plus cooler is roughly the same money for less machine.

The Pi wins if and only if everything direct plays forever, which stops being true the first time someone watches from a phone on a train.

Start with the timezone the process is running in, not the one the interface displays.

If you are running in a container, the app can be configured with your local timezone while the container itself has no TZ set and thinks it is UTC. Most things still look right because the app converts for display, but anything that depends on the underlying clock, including sun calculations in some setups, quietly works in the wrong frame. An hour is exactly what a daylight saving mismatch looks like.

Things to check in order:

• date inside the container versus on the host
• the TZ environment variable on the container
• whether the host's tzdata package is out of date, which happens on machines that have not been updated in a year
• whether your latitude and longitude are still set, since a wiped location can silently fall back to a default

Fixed clock times still working is consistent with this, because those are evaluated in local time by the app itself.

Also check channel overlap while you are in there. Zigbee and 2.4GHz wifi share the band, and if your access point sits on a channel that collides with your Zigbee channel, marginal links go bad first and the garage will be the most marginal link you have. Zigbee 15, 20 or 25 paired with wifi channel 1, 6 or 11 respectively keeps them out of each other's way.

If you go Zigbee, do the channel planning before you pair anything. Pick your Zigbee channel first, set your wifi to the non overlapping partner, and only then start adding devices. Changing the Zigbee channel later usually means repairing sleepy devices one by one, which with twenty sensors is a genuinely bad evening.

If you want belt and braces, add a latch: an input_boolean set when the automation runs and cleared 5 minutes later, with a condition that it must be off. It is slightly ugly but it also protects you from GPS jitter, where a phone bounces out of the zone and back at the edge of the geofence and fires an arrival for someone who never left.

Undervoltage genuinely causes this. A supply sagging to 4.7V under load will make the card controller misbehave well before the Pi itself resets. Official supplies are usually fine, but counterfeits exist on marketplaces and any added extension cable makes it worse.

And measure rather than guess: vcgencmd measure_volts core while the drive spins up, or a cheap inline USB power meter. People spend a lot of time arguing about supplies when a six dollar meter settles it in a minute.

This is the one that changed my setup. Percentages are a distraction, last seen is the truth. I have a single automation that lists anything quiet for a day and sends it to me every Sunday morning.