Media PC Linux Distro?

[BazookaBengt]

I have an older PC after buying a new one around xmas, everything in it is about 10 years old with an nvidia 1060. Plan is to hook it up to my TV and my router so i can access my external hard drive I have connected to my main PC and play videos straight through it. And so I'm looking for the right distro. I'd run it by an AI like I did when switching to Linux to begin with but I ended up going through Pop!_os and Kubuntu before finding Cachy OS and everything just started to run so much smoother. So I'd really like to avoid a repeat by instead asking actual people that hopefully have some experience with this.

So yeah that's it. Looking for a lighter distro that will work well as a media center. Will prolly almost exclusively play video on it and a little bit of web browsing. As I really do like Cachy OS I was thinking id go with another Arch based distro but I am pretty new to Linux as mentioned and I don't really know how much that matters.
Any distro recommendations and reasons why you'd recommend them for a media center is much appreciated.

 

[KGIII]

You don't even really need a lightweight OS for that (probably). A 10-year-old computer will run a modern Linux desktop well enough. I know, because I bought one just to test this theory.

But, seeing as you're going down that route, you might want to look into something headless (no monitor) and just controlling it over your private network (LAN). You can set up a web interface for VLC (for example) and control it with any other device on the LAN.

You can set it up with a monitor, if you'd like. After that, just get the IP address and port. Then, input those two things into your browser's address bar, and you can control VLC remotely. If the IP address doesn't remain consistent, you can usually just use a private domain name, often configured to be .local. So, you'd point the browser at https://<hostname>.local:<port> and that should resolve even if the IP address changes.