Yeah, I just have mine running on my primary desktop (an iMac), but I've done a bit of research on consumer NAS products and the Plex support definitely seems spotty.
As for Plex wanting to transcode things, I mentioned having some issues with my Chromecast Ultra, but even that wasn't too bad. There should definitely be an option to not transcode video at all and let my playback device tell me that if it really can't decode the file. As far as I could tell, that option doesn't exist.
I haven't had any issues with library refreshing with Plex on my iMac and movies shared over SMB from my Linux file server. Plex seems to watch the shares and do small incremental refreshes for new content very quickly.
> I don't care about "album art" type stuff; I don't download/store/play hollywood movies or music, so those features would be irrelevant even if I cared about them in general.
That's definitely valid. Wouldn't basically any playback device that supports DLNA (and can decode your files) work fine for that? For me, the library features are pretty important. I had done a lot of work getting Kodi on my Raspberry Pi setup how I liked it, then I switched to Plex which is just as good or better but with a lot less work and maintenance.
As for Plex wanting to transcode things, I mentioned having some issues with my Chromecast Ultra, but even that wasn't too bad. There should definitely be an option to not transcode video at all and let my playback device tell me that if it really can't decode the file. As far as I could tell, that option doesn't exist.
I haven't had any issues with library refreshing with Plex on my iMac and movies shared over SMB from my Linux file server. Plex seems to watch the shares and do small incremental refreshes for new content very quickly.
> I don't care about "album art" type stuff; I don't download/store/play hollywood movies or music, so those features would be irrelevant even if I cared about them in general.
That's definitely valid. Wouldn't basically any playback device that supports DLNA (and can decode your files) work fine for that? For me, the library features are pretty important. I had done a lot of work getting Kodi on my Raspberry Pi setup how I liked it, then I switched to Plex which is just as good or better but with a lot less work and maintenance.