I’d also suggest taking a look at Jellyfin.
As to the hardware, I’ve seen lots of recommendations for refurbished thin clients on eBay. Good value. Myself, I’m using a pc I had built for live streaming, and pivoted into a server. I think it’s got an i7 in it. I recently added some ram to bulk it up to 32g, and while it stared with a 240gb ssd, it’s now got a whole raid array in it.
I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you.