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How many drives do you have laying around? Synologys are nice (I have 2) but they’re a little pricey. You could go with one of the plus units and run Plex directly from there.
One of my coworkers got a TerraMaster NAS and installed Xpenology (basically the synology OS) on it. There hardware is a little cheaper.
I think I salvaged like 6 of them. I'd have to dig them out of a box for a good count.
Most TVs can read from a usb drive directly; I used to load up all the the seasons of Pokémon onto a external hdd, usb plug it into the tv and just watch it directly
We have an old desktop that's usually turned on for one reason or another. The easiest thing for us was to make the D:\ drive visible on wifi, put all the media on the D:\ drive, and stick VLC on everyone's Roku/FireTV sticks. That way we didn't have to manually add new things to specific drives or worry about which TV's could watch which shows or accidentally run out of space on a thumb drive.
I also used plex for my kids for a while and for the longest time I simply put a couple HDDs into my personal PC and ran plex off my PC. It was more than adequate for just letting them watch whatever shows they wanted, no need to go crazy if you don't have the need for more!
This is true... I have a feeling my PC is pretty power hungry. I'll see how hard it would be to get my PC to WoL. I could have it boot up on a schedule and then power off on a schedule.
I can always migrate off it later.
I also work in IT and I hate for old things to go to waste so a lot of my Plex server is 'salvaged' hard drives from desktops that were collecting dust after the changeover to thin clients.
It's mostly desktop hardware I run, the only thing that's remotely 'server grade' is the Dell Raid card that came out of a decommissioned server also from work.
Also, if you can then encode your files in MP4 for maximum compatibility across devices and less overhead. Plex is great
There is also Kodi if you don't want to host something.