The biggest issue with that is it requires all of your media to be in a flat folder for search to work right.

Auto index has a mode to return results in json. With a touch of html and js you can make a page that will crawl the directory tree and build a simple searchable cache of name to path, and then you can play it from there. It ends up making a request per folder, but in realistic terms it’s not gonna be enough to actually be noticable.

You can then use something like this on a cron to convert anything your browser can’t play and you’re pretty close to a minimalist media server with only static files.
The one I used to use was just a bash script so I didn’t have to wrangle python modules, but I can’t seem to find it.

I ended up dropping it when I bought a nas with all that stuff built in and it generally made my life easier. Worth the money if you can afford it.