I have 16TB NAS dedicated to storing TV shows. It is just a cabinet with ryzen 2600 and no graphics card. I have installed openmediavault in it to access it via smb to other devices. I am an absolute noob in setting up a server. Please tell me how I should go on about turning it into a media consumption machine.
P. S: I usually use VLC on android and MPV on linux to consume the media.
I would look into setting up Jellyfin as others said, there’s multiple guides everywhere but you will need some knowledge for setting up a nice URL in case you want to access it from the internet, that’s when you want to search for things such as free ddns… But it’s quite a lot by then maybe
DDNS is only required for when you want to share it with other people. For accessing your own stuff from anywhere, there’s tailscale. I set aside 30 minutes to read into it and set it up, but found myself with a working VPN between my phone and PC after just 3 minutes. And it’s completely free for this use case.
DDNS takes about the same amount of time to get running these days, something like Caddy + DuckDNS goes together pretty easy. Even for purely personal use, I use DDNS for media access and save the VPN for share access and admin work.
Either way works though.
I have DSlite on my home internet connection, which makes DDNS pretty much impossible. OP should check for that.