In order to get adequate x86 silicon in a NAS, you’re likely going to be looking at high-end and expensive models. Other reasonably priced NAS devices may utilize Intel CPUs, but these CPUs are almost always older and slower parts that can’t keep up with real-time HD transcoding. These models can usually run PMS, but can’t do transcoding at all. Many NAS devices, unfortunately, especially consumer-grade models, feature ARM-based processors. As you can imagine, this requires a fair bit of computing horsepower, and an x86-based processor on top of that. So if you’ve elected to fill your media library with terabytes of lossless Blu-ray rips, PMS will seamlessly take care of making sure those files will play fine when streamed to your NVIDIA Shield tablet, for example. So why doesn’t everyone do this? The answer is that, despite the convenience offered by a NAS-based PMS solution, there is one huge drawback compared to dedicated PMS hardware: transcoding.Īs mentioned earlier, a fantastic feature of PMS is that it can automatically transcode content on the fly to suit the client device. With Plex on a NAS, you can store your media right on the NAS alongside the server software, and have everything run off of one relatively small package.

Mac mini plex media server transcoding