A club I belong to wishes to set up a streaming server for members. I have a 2006 Mac Pro that I’ve offered to donate as the host machine. The big negative is that the latest version of Mac OS that this 2006 Mac Pro will run is 10.7 (Lion). The current versions of Plex Media Server required at least Mac OS 10.9.
That said, I have in my possession a copy of Plex Media Server 0.9.15.6 (Mac), which is the last version of Media Sever that works with Mac OS 10.7 (lion).
Our club has already purchased a lifetime copy of Plex Pass (recent purchase). What I want to know is if this Plex Pass can be used with Plex Media Server 0.9.15.6 (Mac). Or, will installing/activating Plex Pass automatically force or require that Plex Media Server be updated to the latest version?
Also, if a recently purchased Plex Pass will still work with Media Server 0.9.15.6 (Mac), what Plex Pass features (if any) are lost or unavailable due to running an older version of Plex Media Server?
If you are just going to be streaming music (or small video library with limited number of simultaneous users), you might want to research using an nvidia shield pro as a server.
It does have its own limitations, but is actually the only consumer device that comes pre-loaded with a supported version of plex server (and plex client of course).
It is also a low power device, so not a large cost to leave running all the time (versus a laptop or full pc/server).
You would of course need some kind of storage device, either usb attached external drive, or a NAS or other network storage.
Thank you for the recommendation. Our club will be using the Plex Media Server primarily for videos. Almost all of the videos are DVD quality, so not a huge bandwidth hog. We are hoping to be able to handle up to 5 simultaneous streams at the same time. The access will be limited to our members only and we only have 65 members in the club.
We are doing this on a shoestring budget, thus the idea to use my donated 2006 Mac Pro (which is sitting in its box in my garage). It has four SATA drive bays and every video we are planning to make available will fit on a single 2TB drive (easily). We can use the other drive bays for backups/redundancy.
I will investigate the NVIDIA shield and other options. But I already have the Mac Pro and it’s not being used for anything right now. I won’t cost me anything to set it up here at home just to see how it works out. That is, if I can successfully get it to run Mac OS 10.9 or newer.
