Well as soon as I made the next search on this forum I found the answer to my transcoding problem here.
At least I have a recording in progress (which was more than I ever had before). Unless it falls through some how, I can give a hearty thumbs up to the Odroid hc2 as a Plex Media Server platform (inside Openmediavault for me).
Cheers everyone. It has been a stimulating conversation.
