Re: Uncorrectable Horse Staple Battery
To your own server within your network... I can't see much advantage here and there is the added complications and overheads of running the VPN services etc.
I have an Acer that lshw identifes as "Aspire M1200/3200/5200" running as a semi-media centre at a mate's place. He uses it to watch old movies on Youtube, and when I'm there we'll watch other media on it as well (including some high definition videos, and sometimes live stuff over Kodi). The current CPU is a "AMD Phenom(tm) 8450 Triple-Core Processor" which I installed this past weekend, previously it had the default CPU with the model (a 2core of about the same speed). Video is "RS780 [Radeon HD 3200]" and it has 8Gb of RAM in it.
This machine does it's work as his media machine, also currently acts to, well, it gathers media from certain sites and allows others with similar interests (eg in a certain bay) to get that content from us (to a certain ratio). It also has one of my Owncloud servers running which my mate and another mate use for backup purposes.
And on top of all that it runs an instance of OpenVPN that half a dozen devices access. Not for video streaming, he's only able to get ADSL where he is so his upload speeds are sucky, but the VPN provides no noticeable overhead on the network, even when all devices are connected.
(That said, the devices are generally on slower connections anyway, and doing fairly mundane stuff like this one on El Reg, my tablet on the odd page check (and maybe banking stuff if I'm away from home using someone else's wifi (VPN encrypted plus banking site's encryption should make things nice'n'safeenough - vpn is by cert not username/password), and other mundane stuff.
I use it when I visit him as well, and would use a vpn on my own wifi network esp now that this crack is known. I wouldn't bother maybe with wired, but very few tablets have that as an option (though mine has a full fat USB port so I could perhaps get a RJ45 dongle, if it can drive it)
TL:DR; The VPN overheads are actually quite tiny. I run OpenVPN myself and have no problems.