A simplified guide to spin up your own media server
Man, I've seen your other posts but I just wanna get STARTED!
There's a lot of people I've found who really just want some kind of entry point into having more control over their media -- usually it's a desire to break away from Netflix without breaking the bank or spending too much time.
Well, you're in luck. Pretty much any old computer can work as a basic media server for streaming movies, TV, and the like.
Getting your hands on something
If you want something to just BUY NOW RIGHT NOW, I think a great option for just serving basic media is an HP EliteDesk 800 PC. Try to get one that's 7th gen (7xxx series) or newer. You can grab them off used platforms like eBay for under $50, they're quiet, small, and easily upgradable.
You can grab like 32GB of DDR4 RAM for around $40-50.
Lastly, you can grab a decent high-capacity SATA SSD for around $50-60 with around one terabyte of storage.
On eBay, I found a deal that game with 16GB DDR4 RAM and a 1TB SSD for around $117. I'm in the US, but these are very popular little machines that can be found in a lot of countries.
Why not X or Y?
I went with these because they're very boring, low cost, low power consumption machines. You might be wondering why I didn't go with a Ryzen system, and you'd be valid in asking. Ryzen systems generally have higher idle power consumption and your media server will spend most of its time sitting there dormant. Additionally, Intel CPUs have a powerful and efficient transcoder called QuickSync that chews through typical media workloads smoothly.
The OS we're going with
In the spirit of "keep it simple, stupid!" I'm going to give you three options that seem to be the most intuitive for most people:
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Unraid UnRAID "does it all". It's a premium Linux-based solution that lets you manage storage, networking, and various widely used home server applications easily. It's designed to be easy to use and a lot of people swear by it. Unfortunately, it also costs $50 at the time of me writing this. You can demo the software, but I just wanted to make that clear. $50 is a big investment for some budgets.
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TrueNAS Scale TrueNAS SCALE is a relatively new player. It's centered aroudn file storage and sharing, but it's quite easy to roll out a media server using the "apps" available on the platform.
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Windows. Some people are just more comfortable with Windows when starting out. There's no shame in this, and it's a popular option that DOES WORK for limited use cases. If you feel Windows is the easiest to maintain long term, go right ahead and use it.
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Uhhhh you could just buy a Synology and hope and pray it fits your needs lol but at that point you're getting significantly more expensive hardware
Seeding, downloading, obtaining media
There are a lot of ways to go about this. You could run a BitTorrent client on the host server itself, or download stuff on a separate machine and transfer it over the network. Going with the unRAID example, you can obtain a qBittorrent "app" and have it run on your system downloading whatever you like 24/7. There are dedicated VPN "apps" on unRAID as well.
The software
While I'm a big fan of Jellyfin, Plex is the tool I recommend for a turnkey, just works solution. It has easy to use UI, accessing your server remotely is a piece of cake, and transcoding is quite easy to set up. You'll have to subscribe to "Plex Pass" in order to work transcoding though.
The end goal
What you'll have at the end of the day is a small, quiet server that sips on power and also handles a modest media collection of anime, movies, etc.
And here's where I pull out
Each of these OS options have well-written guides and documentation around setting up Plex, and there's nothing I could say that would be significantly better or more sophisticated. I hope my suggestions were able to nudge you in the right direction. Let me know if you have any specific questions or responses in the comments below.