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.
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.