Which of these machines would perform the best as a local Plex server?

General Discussions
1

Hi everyone,
I will soon be setting up a new Plex server and have some doubts about the ideal configuration. The idea is to share it with four neighbors using a dedicated router for local access. We are living/working in a very remote area up north and the bandwidth is terrible via satellite (getting 1.2/0.23 mbps with a 936 ms ping on Ookla right now). Anything that requires the internet to function does not work well here which means no Netflix, no game consoles because of constant updates, no torrents, no nothing! Even youtube is hit or miss on busy hours. I’ve used Plex this summer during my vacation down south and I was pretty amazed by how well it performed with several simultaneous users watching, despite my limited hardware. I figured I could just bring a few terabytes of media back up here so we could all enjoy enjoy the best television in HD thanks to the awesomeness of Plex.

I’m getting to the point: I have invested in a good router and external storage drives, but I do not plan on buying a dedicated machine to run the server. I have three “old”, but far from obsolete PCs that could host Plex and I am not sure which one would handle transcoding several different streams simultaneously the best. What resources does video and audio transcoding need the most? Should I be looking at the CPU, RAM or GPU specs ? Perhaps it’s a little of everything?

More info about the media files and how the server will be used:

  • The files are of many different format, ranging from SDTV Xvid to x265 HEVC. About 85% of the content is in x264. There is no huge 4K or UHD quality files afaik.
  • The majority of the files have dual audio tracks (french and english) in a mkv container. Audio formats are all over the place with mp3, AAC, AC3, DTS, stereo, 5.1, 7.1, etc.
  • The files will be played on many different devices. There will be a Roku 2, a Mi Box, a chromecast, a PS4, NVidia Shield tablet, computer browsers, iPods, etc. From my experience, the Roku can direct play many of the files I have and I’m hoping it’s the same with the PS4 and Chromecast.
  • It’s hard to tell if we’re all going to use it at the same hours (five users), but I would say three simultaneous transcode jobs is the maximum it would have to handle.

Here are the three possibilities:

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Last question: If I go with option 2 or 3, I could go with a Linux installation rather than my usual Windows…I keep hearing about how great Linux is, but I have no clue why. Are the pros of using Linux important enough to consider switching from the good old windows interface?

Thanks in advance.

2

THE most important thing is how your media is formatted.
Read up on what works best for most plex clients eg mp4, x264, AAC.

Are the neigbours hardwired? as Wifi will give you grief.
If you get your media formatted right and limit transcoding #1 will probably do the job.

Using linux will give you no advantage on performance and as you do not know linux why bother at this stage.