Cables are always best but if you can't cable everything make sure you have a good strong wifi connection to avoid any playback issues with high quality content. Make sure you have good reliable connections between your server and what ever devices that you want to stream your media to. (Google these)ģ.Getting a smart tv that supports Plex, or a Chromecast or nvidia shield etc to get your media on your tv.Ĥ. This gives you options to expand and use other helpful technologies like RAID or Backup. This could be a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or some hard drives in your server to store the media. Also if your pc breaks your media still works and if your server goes down you still have your pc. Possible lower power consumption, no slowdown on your main pc, no worrying about powering it on to stream. This has many benefits that have already been mentioned. IMHO, nothing too big an powerful and can be an old PC. There are a few things you can do when starting out that will save you a lot of pain in the future.Ī server running plex is best. I would build a small server and leave the desktop for daily use, less cumbersome and you can keep all nice and tidy, but thats me. This of course dosent matter if you have your PC ON most of the time. Also the server could be on 24/7 and you wont need to turn on the PC to watch a movie. Your desktop its probably taking around 500w, a server could be as low as 100 - 200W depending on the load. In other works your media server probably wont take a big impact in your PC so your normal use wouldnt be affected, but as always it depends.Īnothe thing to consider is the power usage and stabilty. This takes a lot of CPU and can impact your daily use of the machine.

if you want to play for example, an MKV in a smartphone or something like that, probably the phone wont play the video file directly, so in this case Plex transcode (Converts the video format) for your specific device. This wont take too much power so you can run it alongside your other apps in your daily desktop (With not much users at the same time, this can sature your lan conection specially on blurays streams). In the backend, its just streams the files to your final device (Roku, raspberry, another computer, etc). The frontend of plex its like a netflix for your media.

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