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With external drives, worrying about the internal HD, RAM, and modern ports are all overkill.
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Spend as little as possible, on either a used Mini, or a new Mini. – Kudos in noting older Mini’s are quite up to the job of both transcoding and other headless server-esque functions. Could’ve used a paragraph in the Macworld piece, IMHO. This makes the Mini *incredibly* cost-effective if you’re also using Plex. It’s a *far* more reliable and flexible solution than any Time Capsule, NAS, or whatever. – As you note here, a big advantage of a headless Mini on the LAN is the ability to also host backups and general file serving. Read the rest of the article on Macworld. You can, of course, use that Mac mini for other things, such as using it as a file server, or for Time Machine backups. In this article, I’m going to tell you how you can set up a Mac mini as a dedicated Plex server. (If you do have a lot of videos that need transcoding, a NAS might not be a good fit for Plex.) Plex doesn’t need a lot of horsepower to manage and stream your media, unless it transcodes video. The Mac mini is a perfect candidate for this. If you have a large media collection, you may want to use a Mac as a dedicated device to run Plex. It’s advantageous that Plex’s server be always on, so you can start watching your movies and TV shows without having to boot your Mac. (Heck, you could even set it up on a Raspberry Pi.)
SETTING UP PLEX ON MAC MINI INSTALL
You can install the Plex server software on a variety of devices: your Mac, a PC, a NAS (network attached storage device), and more.
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With the arrival of the fourth-generation Apple TV, I found myself trying out the Plex media server, and I realized that using Plex is one of the best ways to watch media on the Apple TV.