Been there, done that with a couple of my Minis and then dropped the idea altogether. Mind you, it was a HTPC so a player/gateway to content, not a player, media converter and storage. A Mini is rather not suitable as a storage solution and not powerful enough for on-the-fly converting of modern media in it's power efficiency envelope.
Started off with a heavily upgraded (2,1 firmware, C2D 2.33, RAM) original 2006 Intel Mini that worked as a player (Kodi) for a locally stored library. It quickly evolved into a library stored on a network server in the basement and connected with Ethernet, since the 2.5" high-capacity drives were insanely expensive back then.
Next was a 2012 Mini that took over, because the expectations rose - 4k content and such. A late 2014 Mini followed.
Just then I stumbled upon a Hardkernel Odroid C2 that did all I expected from the Mini for a fraction of price, 10% of the energy consumption, had HDMI CEC for single remote operation and did 4k60p on my big screen with ease. I then replaced it with an even better Odroid N2+, welcome HDR galore.
And then I realized it is all too clumsy, does not allow me to make use of the Apple environment as I want to (lack of actually working Airplay for example) so I switched from a Kodi-managed media library with an SQL backend on the fileserver to Jellyfin managing the library on the server, AppleTV 4K with Ethernet and Infuse Pro as a player communicating with the Jellyfin. Since I get to have Infuse on all my iOS devices, it does not matter if I play on AppleTV at home or on an iPad when I'm away, it just works. Jellyfin runs on a VM on the server in the basement and if it needed, it would convert the media on the fly as I passed through a GPU for this particular VM, but it actually does not need to.
My AppleTV does not consume any significant energy, I need the server anyway so an additional VM for Jellyfin is not a trouble, the server contains a number of 8TB drives so there is space for the storage.
So if you want to just play your content - the Mini is too much of a hassle. Just get a Pi4, Odroid N2+, install Kodi, point to your media folder on Windows machine, job done, Or get an AppleTV, install Infuse (Pro subscription recommended, as it allows 5.1 and higher sound as well as HDR video and some additional codecs), point to your media folder on Windows machine, job done.
