We will be leveraging plex’s Hardware transcoding capabilities with quicksync heavily for this article. Unless you know for certain that all of your devices can direct play all of your media i would stay away from trying to run a plex server on a rasberry pi. I would recommend sizing your first server appropriately to avoid unnecessary costs down the road. While you can run a Plex media server on practically any physical device from a Rasberry Pi, to a Nas you’ll probably grow out of some of the smaller and cheaper options like a Rasberry Pi fairly quickly.
Otherwise figure out the number of devices that might be transcoding at any given time and save that for later. If you are running this inside your home and will only have a few devices connecting at a time and those devices can direct play most of your media you should stick to the small server size recommendations. Next you should determine the total number of transcodes you might require. For now this article will cover desktop grade hardware that’s both practical for most people to run in their home, powerful enough to have the performance you’ll want, AND that won’t hurt your wallet too much. If you are looking for recommendations on an enterprise grade server that will be addressed in a later video. The physical size, noise, and heat generated by a standard enterprise grade server can be a problem for most people running a Plex server in their house. Let’s start with logistical issues you should think about first. When designing and building a Plex server you’ll need to take a few things into consideration.