With these systems almost guaranteed to have better processors than the typical NAS, the transcoding issues mentioned above become irrelevant.
Any x86 PC running Windows, OS X, or Linux can act as a dedicated or shared sever for Plex.
This is where dedicated Plex servers come into the mix. Otherwise, you won’t be able to play any media that isn’t direct play eligible. You’d therefore have to maintain tight controls over your potential playback clients (i.e., only use iPads, or Amazon Fire TVs) or encode multiple versions of each file to ensure compatibility with all of your diverse devices. The problem is that, while there are some universal standards, many media clients support different codecs, containers, and bitrates. If the client can play back the original file, Plex will use something called ‘Direct Play’ and simply serve the original file across the network to the client, a process that virtually any modern NAS can handle.
Plex only transcodes video if you explicitly tell it to, or if the client device can’t play back the original file. If your NAS hardware isn’t capable or fast enough to transcode outgoing video, but is otherwise compatible with PMS, you can still enjoy a smooth experience by paying close attention to your playback devices and the media files you encode. In order to get adequate x86 silicon in a NAS, you’re likely going to be looking at high-end and expensive models. Other reasonably priced NAS devices may utilize Intel CPUs, but these CPUs are almost always older and slower parts that can’t keep up with real-time HD transcoding. These models can usually run PMS, but can’t do transcoding at all. Many NAS devices, unfortunately, especially consumer-grade models, feature ARM-based processors. As you can imagine, this requires a fair bit of computing horsepower, and an x86-based processor on top of that. So if you’ve elected to fill your media library with terabytes of lossless Blu-ray rips, PMS will seamlessly take care of making sure those files will play fine when streamed to your NVIDIA Shield tablet, for example. So why doesn’t everyone do this? The answer is that, despite the convenience offered by a NAS-based PMS solution, there is one huge drawback compared to dedicated PMS hardware: transcoding.Īs mentioned earlier, a fantastic feature of PMS is that it can automatically transcode content on the fly to suit the client device. With Plex on a NAS, you can store your media right on the NAS alongside the server software, and have everything run off of one relatively small package.
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