I also lucked out and scored a 14TB external hard drive to hold my media for around $160 on some big sale Amazon was doing at the time. All in all around a $400 project with a few weeks of work, mostly researching everything I laid out above

Came with Windows pre-installed out of the box which was also nice because I didn't have to set up a whole entire operating system like I would have for the Pi. Just plugged it in to a monitor, set up Plex, and it's been basically running with no issues since then for the past week or two

A mini PC with a quadcore Intel processor is better for that reason and will cost the same as a Pi. People highly recommended Beelink as a brand, the S12 Pro came up a lot. I ended up buying an S13 off ebay for under $200 ebay.us/m/ohNGFW

What I found out was a Pi can work but is too big of a hassle because it can't transcode media, which is going to cause a major headache when it comes to switching languages or turning on subtitles or trying to watch something in a filetype that doesn't agree with the device you're watching on

Yeah literally just went through this whole process lol

I'd say it's Darkness followed by Looooooong John for me lol

Yesssssss

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOO!!!

Good morning

Don't abandon him.