Personally, I haven’t run into a situation where I could only configure something via UI. There’s always been an option to toggle between a UI editor, and just a text editor for the appropriate YAML. There could be exceptions that I haven’t encountered, but they’re definitely few and far between.
To be fair, I’m guessing the majority of Pi’s are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won’t be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.
That’s only if you want to watch it outside your home network, and either way I would recommend not just opening a port to the world like that. I’d say to use Tailscale (which is trivially easy to install) for remote viewing.
Personally, I used TrueNAS Core (known as simply FreeNAS at the time) for my very first NAS setup knowing nothing about BSD-based systems, and it’s been pretty much fine. It has ZFS which is absolutely desirable for a NAS that you store important things on, and It has some quirks but Ive been able to accomplish everything I’ve wanted to with it just by looking up the miriad of guides available. Not saying it’s better than the alternatives, just sharing my personal experience.
However, if you’ve already got OMV setup and it’s working for you so far, I would stick with it. I believe you could always import your drives into another NAS system if you decide to move later, so why fix what isn’t broken?
Ah, I see. If you’re really looking for a beginner option, I might just setup a Samba share for the drive. Then you can get into more advanced options once you get more comfortable.
How come the folder share you currently have isn’t sufficient? Most systems should be able to access Samba, so what particular goal are you trying to accomplish?
If you’re actually ripping bluerays, I would highly recommend using MakeMKV. It’s technically paid software but while it’s in beta you can can a free license key from their forums. BluRays can be formatted oddly and include a bunch of crap you probably don’t want (preroll ads, etc), so when I tried to rip one with jusy ffmpeg it was a pain, but MakeMKV deals with most of that for you and gets a 1-to-1 copy of the movie files + anything like captions and alternate audip tracks.
You aren’t beholden to any other countries laws, but such domains are the property of their respective countries and their usaging can be conditional and revoked at any time (see what happened recently with .ml domains). Personally I use a .xyz domain because it’s also very cheap, although I’ve heard that it can make you appear more “suspicious” to antivirus companies and such.
Hmm, I would only purchase them as a third (or more) layer of redundancy, or maybe for storing things like ripped media that could just be re-ripped (or re-torrented) should the drives fail. I would not trust them for anything important since you have no idea what kind of environment they were in for all those years.