I would like to be able to let friends connect from outside my house to stream media and allow them access so they can add films and the server goes off and finds them, extracts them, and adds them to the media server.
This is going to be the second most expensive part of this process (the first being storage). Direct streaming for one person can be done on anything that can play your chosen video quality. Streaming for other people will require at least a video card, and a processor that can handle multiple people, as well as the extra storage that other people will want to use. You can use a single pi4 for one person, but you’ll want to look at a desktop PC with a modern-ish graphics card (for the encode) if you want to share with other people.
Bluray. https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/releasedates.php?year=2024 There is a shitload of releases coming out every month. It’s a mix of old and new, but that’s actually good news.
A slowdown of bluray player releases does not mean that bluray is dead. It just means that the current market is saturated. Bluray will last as long as video game consoles will, at the minimum.