I looked into the price of a rasberry pi 4 and everything you need to go with it and thought about what I have in the end and decided against. It aint cheap anymore for what it is and transcoding is handicapped
Runs fine until Bill Gates decides to reboot the machine, I am sick of windows machines running the server. I am looking at the M1 as well but was wondering about its transcoding capabilities. You take any build with an Nvidia card in it for transcoding and you are way past $699 for M1 entry. The GPU, CPU and MB will certainly cost more than that and take up way too much realestate.