I have a ThinkCentre m90q with an i3. It’s a few years old. It’s a lot more powerful than a Pi. A Pi will not cut it.
You will preferably need something with modern hardware encoding. Support for h265 and AV1 is a requirement nowadays to play high quality sources and find anything for newer stuff. Moreso if you want to watch 4k content.
That isn’t what normalized means in the context of databases.
Also databases store the same data many times over often. For redundancy and load-balancing purposes. Really, federation just takes care of replication somewhat.