If power consumption isn’t a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I’m running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It’s in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD’s pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren’t reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.
If power consumption isn’t a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I’m running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It’s in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD’s pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren’t reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.