PMS has a problem, I would argue.
By all accounts, it ought to run on a powerful PC, with loads of surplus CPU, hardware decoding abilities, RAM etc.
But after having run my Plex on Synology for years I decided to switch it to Windows, to enable it to run on a much more powerful CPU.
I have concluded that, despite my Synology NAS being under-powered, it is overall a much better solution.
And I think that’s crazy.
PMS for Windows doesn’t run as an actual service, meaning a user has to be logged in. That actually makes it hard to use the PC for anything else. We bought a HTPC and it seemed obvious to move the PMS here. But now I either have to leave PMS running in the TV account, which needs to be non-admin so the children don’t mess it up, or leave another user logged in behind that one to drive the PMS in the background. Then, suddenly, I can’t remote desktop into that account without throwing the restricted TV account off (Windows Pro only supports 1 logged in account over RDP).
So you decide to put PMS in a VM, running on a same machine, but now you don’t have access to the hardware decoder.
All that would be simpler if PMS actually was a true service.
But even if that worked, PMS on Windows seems to crash fairly regularly. In the last week it’s just stopped twice.
Contrast this to the Synology PMS install. Rock solid (or automatically gets restarted after a crash, at least), with full hardware decoding support.
It doesn’t run as fast and the picture previews and tagging takes FOREVER (it’s still not through my full 45 GB of family pictures, after several years), but it at least really, truly IS a server.
It just baffles me why PMS isn’t running as a Windows service. As a reuslt, a much slower, relatively underpowered, in-cupboard NAS is, all told, still a better solution that a beefy PC.
