Wow it's been a very long time since I posted but here goes I've got an old HP Microserver N54L which I'm using as a storage and plex media server. The issue I have is that it struggle with transcoding some films when I'm using my Amazon fire tv. Plex always comes up with 'your server isn't powerful enough to transcode this movie' or something to that effect. What should I do? Should i buy/build a new server??? Or should I buy an Intel NUC and use the HP as storage?
You could upgrade your Microserver with a better CPU, I have 2 Gen8's one with a Xeon which runs as a Hypervisor with 4 VMs including a dedicated Plex VM and the other has an i3 which is used as an Unraid storage device.
Can't you just disable transcoding? I personally use KODI (on an android tv box) connected to a SMB share and it works great. The initial setup is a bit of a pain, but its rock solid once you get it going.
If you have Plex Pass and install an Nvidia GPU you can push hardware transcoding into the GPU. You could get a little NUC and have that run Plex, using the micro server as a NAS.
