Not a biologist, not something I study, just a passing thought:
I would guess a large number of venomous animals are also poisonous, because you'd be ingesting their venom. Probably not always the case; you're not always eating the venom containing parts, and it my not be poisonous unless injected into the bloodstream/tissue. But that's what my intuition tells me. 🤷
Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin are all legal, and each have ways to serve liveTV alongside your own locally stored content, and DVR that liveTV if you want. You'd just have to purchase a liveTV subscription from your local provider (or go the Pirate route ofc).
Emby has what they call 'Emby Connect' which is entirely optional and is basically a glorified DNS service.
It doesn't proxy connections, it just passes on the hostname to the client. The server is still required to setup port forwarding or other routing like tailscale or a proxy on a vps.
Emby Connect will let you sign into your local server using your emby.media credentials, but unlike Plex it's completely optional and only works once explicitly linked to the local user of an Emby server.
I only bring it up because you explicitly said you have no idea why it doesn't work.
Take things at a comfortable pace; there's no sense overwhelming yourself. Then you just forget what you've done and end up lost in your own maze.
I started with Plex myself, almost 10 years ago. Moved to Emby, where I learned about buying a domain, setting up ssl through a reverse proxy, and just continued to explore from there. Today I run ~26 containers/projects across three systems and I'm always keeping my eye out for interesting new things.
Sounds like you're behind cgNAT, which essentially means there's another router owned by your ISP that's between yours and the open internet, which also requires port forwarding, but your ISP will never do that for you.
It complicates things, but the solution(s) are tools like tailscale, cloudflare Tunnels, or to rent a VPS just to host a proxy/vpn.
Plex solves this by using their own public servers as a proxy for you, but this is part of how they have control over your users/server/data, such as blocking remote streaming... That makes more than a few people uncomfortable.
When a user wants to connect to a 'private' plex server, they must first sign into their plex.tv account, which then provides the auth token needed to login to the users server (even if both the client and server are on the same lan)
With this system, Plex can monitor and control every single connection to every plex server; limiting access to whatever they want. Even your own local content.
Plex has an automatic proxy service hosted by their public servers. If you haven't or can't configure port forwarding correctly, plex will route the connection through their own servers.
The problem is, that also means Plex co has total control over your server and the data sent between it and clients if they so choose. Anything from quietly logging the data sent back and fourth, to controlling who can connect and what they can do while they are.
Jellyfin has to be correctly exposed to the internet via port forwarding or tools like tailscale/a vpn; but it's entirely your server under your control. You have ultimate control over how your server can be accessed, but that also means you're responsible for actually setting that up.
I miss the layout of my neighbourhood from when I was 5-10 years old.
I lived in one of the middle units of a 10 unit townhouse. Each had a ~30'x30' fenced in backyard that opened up to a large field and playground. The u-shaped roads that flanked this field and the houses along them left a large cross shaped grassy alley on either side of the field.
I'm not sure that description does it justice, but this setup created a huge amount of grassy space for the surrounding neighbourhood kids to run around in, while keeping them somewhat contained. There were only 3 entrances/exits to this neighbourhood that were pretty well supervised by parents, so the kids were able to roam a pretty big area without anyone having to worry. Something I've come to appreciate more with age.
It also meant a TON of snow to build and play with in the winter, without playing in the road :D 🇨🇦
Even if they do extend it; budget is voted on once every 2 years. A one year stop gap just leaves people without health care one year from now with no planned re-budgeting... It's a loss ether way.
The self-hosting part was mostly about total control over my own systems and less about the paid features. It's very much not necessary.
As far as pro features go, It was the TOTP authenticator integration that was kind of important to me. ~20% of my accounts have TOTP 2fa, and bitwardens clients will automatically copy the latest 2fa code into the clipboard when filling a password.
Bitwarden will even tell you if a saved account could have 2fa (the service offers it), but it's not setup/saved in bitwarden atm.
I currently have 110 unique user+password combos. I wouldn't want to change all those even once, if I were breached and had used similar credentials everywhere.
Bitwarden keeps them well managed, synced between devices, and allows me to check the whole database for matches/breaches via haveibeenpwned integration. Plus because I prefer to keep things in-house as much as possible, I even self-host the server with vaultwarden walled off behind my own vpn, instead of using the public servers. (this also means it's free, instead of a paid service)
Quite the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox%E2%80%93Schlep_controversy