What a great question to kick things off @e10kstarfire !! This is a topic that does come up pretty frequently as a discussion topic within Plex. The short answer is that we don’t have any plans to make this leap right now.
The longer answer is that hardware design is a different and complex activity. The capacity of computing in an amazingly small bundle these days is absolutely incredible. The challenges would not be around designing this type of hardware. One of the biggest challenges here would be resources. We are a bunch of software nerds and bringing on people to build out hardware that would meet our high requirements would be expensive, especially when we have invested so much in getting the software running on so many different clients already out in the market.
Speaking as a Plex user I would love this! However right now it doesn’t quite fit in with our current efforts. Now, the fun part of this Fireside event is that we get to point out awesome products like our HTPC builds that all you need to do is to bring hardware in order to get an amazing experience up and running.
I can add that making it even easier to run the HTPC app on already available hardware is the kind of thing that gets attention during internal hackathons!
