I've been using Kodi/librelec on a Pi 5 for ages, just started playing around with Android TV LineageOS builds for it + Wholphin to browse my Jellyfin library. No Google Play Bullshit, slightly slower boot than librelec, CEC works nicely, only annoyance is that I have to manually hit the power button to turn it on. Unfortunately streaming services (allegedly) only do 480p because it lacks DRM Widevine stuff, but I stopped using anything but Jellyfin years ago. Might play around with some adfree alternate YouTube clients today on it, seems like there are plenty to choose from.

Libreelec was fine but the library syncing + UX wasn't ideal. Android TV is a lot easier for other people in my life to navigate (but still not great).

I use Mythic Beasts as my domain registrar, they have a DDNS API endpoint. Nice design, you can basically just ping it with your public key to update the DDNS entry to your origin IP (or manually set it in the request, if you want to introduce another point of failure).

I have a cron job that runs every 15 minutes that hits that endpoint, literally just a one-liner script. I have never understood why everyone is using entire libraries for such a simple operation.

Agreed. Set up tailscale (or wireguard + DDNS) and a pi.hole for ad blocking on your phone and laptop whenever you're away from home.

That'll let you shake out the issues with running a home server. Once it feels stable and you have a feel for running things reliably, you can try out a home music/media server with Jellyfin, an RSS reader like freshRSS, run your own private file server with NextCloud, sync private notes with Syncthing and Obsidian, watch TV shows and movies on Kodi, and so much more.

But don't get carried away with a million services at first. Just getting a home server up and running takes some trial and error and luck!

Do you pay for a domain? They likely provide dynamic DNS (DNS). If you're lucky, they have an API for it, instead of an app, and you can configure a cronjob on your home server to run every 1-5 minutes (or more often, if your IP is super unstable!).