Agreed. The fundamental concept doesn’t seem bad. Usually it is harder to create than copy. So for someone to invest resources into creating something, we might want a system that allows him to recoup those costs before someone else who didn’t need to front load those costs undercuts him.
But as you said the current system is broken.
You could also ask over in !homelab@lemmy.ml . I mostly mention the power consumption, because of you an “old tower server” even if cheap might consume quite a bit and efficiency has improved by a lot. So even if the older hardware is cheaper you’d probably get that back from saving electricity over time.
I think it makes sense to think a bit about your needs and budget. Does noise matter? Another question would be how much storage you want and if you need redundancy. SSD prices have fallen quite a bit, so even 4tb SSDs aren’t that expensive anymore.
If you’d be fine with that, then there are quite a few cheap intel based (for quicksync) mini PCs for sale that could be an option.
If you’d want more storage and are looking at larger capacity HDDs, then you’d have to decide if you want to build yourself or buy a prebuild nas.
I’m sadly not quite up to date on what specific models are the best atm.
As someone mentioned do you need to do something computational intensive like transcoding? Another question would be if electricity costs matter to you (would it run 24/7 for example?)
How often do you actually use the UI? Seems like most people just automate stuff with *arr apps at least for movies/tv shows
I would add jellyseer as a nice option to request movies rather then doing it directly through so are/radarr
Usenet is a good option then, although not completely free
“TRaSH Guides” might be worth checking out. I am not aware of any script that takes care of all settingsy but if you follow their guides it should be pretty easy to set everything up correctly. I assume you’ be using docker or docker-compose