Simple plex server - advice please

[crictor]

Hello, I'm a new parent in the process of collecting content for a simple kid plex server in our house. I'm going to use some components I have laying around so if you guys could take a look and see if I have the right idea that would be fantastic.

The motherboard I have is a Zotac IONITX-A-U
Atom 330 1.6GHz Dual core
4gb ddr2 800 ram
3 x sata 3Gb/s (newegg says raid support is 0/1/0+1)

The idea is to buy a cheap 3x3.5" bay mini-itx tower and 3x2T WD NAS drives, install Freenas and plex, kids have access to personal kid netflix through Roku on our main TV (60" 1080p).

I only care about the content on our main tv so I plan to rip all of our DVD/BluRays and then convert them down so we can view them as 1080p with direct stream.

Ok on to the questions:

1. The motherboard has 3 sata ports and newegg claims that raid configs supported is 0/1/0+1, (ill have to dig the manual out to verify) with this information how should I setup my raid?
2. With the 3 sata ports now full I should then have Freenas/plex installed with a USB thumbdrive?
3. I rip a Blu Ray and it comes out to around 30gb or so, how do you convert them down to the point where the quality is as good as it can be while still being able to direct stream and having a reasonable file size (1-5gb ish). Reword; how do I convert my rips to get the best quality on this Atom processor without transcoding. It seems with handbrake its kind of a guessing game as to what the file size and quality will be at, is there a way to know that sweet spot? All movies are intended to play on a 60" 1080p TV.


All input would be fantastic thanks.

 

[Chris Moore]

I would not think that processor has enough power to transcode video and there is not enough RAM to handle the overall operation of the server.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Jailer]

Nividia chipset, old slow CPU, half the required RAM for just a basic filer.......

Yeah, save yourself the headache and forgo this equipment. Check out the hardware guide in the resources section if you want to run FreeNAS.

 

[adrianwi]

You might be able to use that hardware to run Plex on something else (your favoured linux distro), but I wouldn't recommend using it for FreeNAS.

Handbrake should let you specify the file format and quality, but the size will depend on the source. So long as your Plex client can direct play the final file, the size probably doesn't matter, other than from a storage and maybe network perspective.

 

[chris crude]

You might be able to use that hardware to run Plex on something else (your favoured linux distro), but I wouldn't recommend using it for FreeNAS.

Handbrake should let you specify the file format and quality, but the size will depend on the source. So long as your Plex client can direct play the final file, the size probably doesn't matter, other than from a storage and maybe network perspective.

VidCoder is an offshoot of Handbrake and does a good job in my opinion. I like being able to save my settings then batch encode many titles at once.

 

[crictor]

You might be able to use that hardware to run Plex on something else (your favoured linux distro), but I wouldn't recommend using it for FreeNAS.

Handbrake should let you specify the file format and quality, but the size will depend on the source. So long as your Plex client can direct play the final file, the size probably doesn't matter, other than from a storage and maybe network perspective.

Ok so freenas is probably not an option. A friend of mine uses a raspberry pi for his plex server. It took a min to load a video but the playback was 1080p silky smooth. So my atom should definitely be able to playback 1080p video. Do you know of any standalone headless OS thats good to run a plex server?

 

[Jailer]

As long as you use a client that supports direct play of your video then you shouldn't have any issues.

I'd look to Ubuntu server or FreeBSD.