My 2.5 year old loves watching classic Pokemon. I'll be honest, so do I. But have you tried doing that? It's fucking insane.
The first half of S1 is on Netflix
The second half is on Amazon but you need an extra subscription to watch it.
The theird season (johto) is also Amazon.
The 4th is no where but Archive.org of all places... Which is called Johto Champions, so it really feels like the end of the season but it's another 52 episodes!
You would think pokemon.com would have all this (they have a lot, and it's all free) but they don't!
Seeing S4 (is that even right?) On Archive.org is really pushing me to want to build a Plex server. Having all this content in one place would be very nice.
I do IT work by day, and I have some older 2TB platter drives from a retired camera server laying around. What's the easiest way to get my foot in the door? Do I save up some $$ for a Synology box?
Building a NAS if your comfortable with it is the better option, better hardware/cost generally then pre-built synology (the benefit is really they are the ones responsible for managing the experience). Once you have the case/hardware, you can toss TrueNAS on it.
Personally, I have one machine setup as a NAS, one machine as a router running VyOS (virtualized on proxmox) with core services, then a few extra machines for things like jellyfin, etc.
I have most of the pokemon collection, you can find a lot of the seasons on ebay and rip them once you get the disks. There are several auto ripping scripts out there (personally made my own, pass through the dvd/blu-ray drive and auto detect media type).
I don't have to worry about a company just not providing video service anymore for some licensing issue or something