Canada

A couple of people have asked for more info about my setup, so here's what I did. I'm on mobile, so forgive any typos:

1. I bought a refurbished Dell mini PC from some website or other - if you Google "refurbished Dell mini PC" it'll probably be the top result. It doesn't need to be fast or have too much memory, but I've got a 2TB hard disk in mine, which is surprisingly cheap. Also needs at least one HDMI port.

2. I installed Ubuntu 20.04, and made a single user with no password, then set it to boot straight to the desktop. Plugged it directly into the t.v. with an HDMI cable.

3. I bought a cheap wireless keyboard with a roller ball in it that (barely, need a better one) can be used from my couch.

4. Installed Jellyfin and set it to run as a background service on boot. It has two directories it cares about: ~/Videos/Film and ~/Videos/Television

5. Set up ssh so that I can use scp to push files from my personal laptop to the server without having to dick around with thumb drives etc. I also have a script that checks how much disk space is available on the media server so I don't run out (that 2TB drive fills up fast).

6. Got a NordVPN subscription and use Transmission on my personal laptop to download anything I want to see, push it to the server.

For a while, I also had an external domain name and IP so I could watch my videos on my phone while travelling, but I switched routers recently and something broke. I haven't set this back up, but there are services that will give you a static IP and route requests to your actual IP so you can have a static domain name without having to pay your ISP for a static IP.

EDIT: also, you can set commands to run at login, so it boots directly to Firefox running in kiosk mode on the Jellyfin web app. The end result is that on boot, I get the Ubuntu symbol, a brief flash of desktop, and then I'm browsing my media library full screen.