PMS on Macbook or NAS?

General Discussions
1

I have just purchased a Synology DS918+ NAS and I am trying to decide whether to install the Plex Media Server on the NAS or leave it on my 2012 Macbook Pro laptop where it currently resides.

By way of background, for most of the time, the PMS will be asked to play music or stream movies to the central audiio system / TV in our home (through an Apple TV). It will be rare for us to be streaming to more than one device at the same time (no kids at home). We do travel overseas a lot and we like to have good access to our media whilst travelling. In other words, we will not be heavy users of the PMS /NAS but we do want the best outcome in terms of speed, reliability, etc.

Given our needs, would we be better off leaving the PMS on the Macbook rather than installing it on the NAS? One of my concerns with moving it over to the NAS is that, as I understand it, I will have to reconstruct the Plex library from scratch (OSX to Open Source issues). That really doesn’t appeal as I have done a lot of work to get the metadata right (particularly for my classical music collection) and i don’t want to do it all again but I will if having the PMS on the NAS will give us a better result.

Appreciate your views?

2

All thought I’m against running Plex on NAS in this scenario it makes sense. Around house you will be using DirectPlay and remote streaming should be possible seeing that Synology CPU Passmark is 2171 (and you need around 2k for 1080p stream). Moving from Macbook means less devices, means less power consumption.
You don’t need to start library from scratch, it can be moved to new installation but it requires some work: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201370363-Move-an-Install-to-Another-System
But then again, do you want to touch running system if it works?

3

Thanks Bartlomiej, may I ask why you are (generally) against running Plex on a NAS?

I’ve read the article on moving the library. I’m not overly confident about my ability to pull that one off but I guess I won’t have a choice if I decide to move Plex to the NAS. I have ‘locked’ all my settings in Plex. Is that likely to help?