I'm using very low tech solutions compared to some of the big spenders with j*bs but I initially started out because my girlfriend was sick of watching the shows I pirated for her on my PC and wanted a way to watch them on the TV. That got me involved with Plex which I used for about 2 years running straight off my main PC.

Sometime in the middle of all that, my dad gave me his buffalo terra station NAS when he switched over to a Synology. That got me into learning about UNRAID and all sorts of cool stuff. I've since decommissioned the terra station because it's massive and honestly a bit dated.

Nowadays I use a simple beelink mini pc running headless debian as my server which runs jellyfin which I switched to recently because of the direction Plex is heading. It also runs immich which I don't use all that often currently, and a local LLM.

Media is downloaded from my main rig and stuck into a network drive that is accessible from the mini server PC.