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For the moment the videos are being stored on a couple of 2TB external drives, but I plan to move them across to a NAS before long.
#Plex for mac mini mac
Using the Mac Mini that I’d purchased for development seems better - since I can then also use the Mac Mini (with attached blu-ray player) to progressively rip my old DVD and blu-ray collection. Google’s Chromecast seems better, but its yet another device. There’s Apple TV, but reviews of this have been mixed. I’d like to still be able to do this going forward.
#Plex for mac mini tv
Many of my home projects and late night work was done with Babylon 5, a variant of Star Trek or some other TV program/movie playing in the bottom corner of my screen. As optical drives disappear from our devices (Macbook Retina, Macbook Air, iPads, Galaxy tablets etc) it's getting harder to watch my existing library of DVDs and blu-ray disks … not that Apple ever supported blu-ray anyway, even though I still think its the best format for purchasing content.
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Having our collective libraries available centrally, and easily playable on our television allows us to enjoy our TV shows and movies together as a family - rather than in insolation, crouched over our laptops and iPads as we’d previously done.
#Plex for mac mini 1080p
If I try to play a 1080p file that’s too high (for instance high profile 4.2) for my 3rd gen aTV to handle, it’ll peg the NAS’s CPU and stutter and basically not play. Most of my media is in an MKV container with H264 (high profile 4.1)/AC3 inside, so my NAS can handle the demuxing, but even transcoding an audio stream (for example, DTS to AC3) can cause my NAS to hit 75% CPU usage.
#Plex for mac mini software
I bought it because it supposedly had hardware transcoding ability, but one the Synology software supports it (read: not plex).
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This is based on my experience with a Synology DS214play. If you have media in a format your client (aTV, SmartTV, Computer, etc.) can natively handle, you’ll be golden otherwise you may be disappointed by this option. The problem with this is that the CPU is underpowered for transcoding (if necessary).
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