Sadly, older PCs with the depreciated AGP slot will have to rely on the processor being beefy enough to handle the strain. So practically any modern PCI-E graphics card will fit the bill really, meaning that upgrading will cost you next to nothing. Chipsets meeting these requirements include Nvidia's GeForce 8 series or later, Intel's GMA X4500HD or later, and AMD's Radeon R700 (HD4000) or later. This could be an older computer otherwise destined for the scrapheap, or you might be in the market to purchase a brand new desktop or laptop for the job - if so, a living room-friendly box such as those offered by Zotac fits the bill perfectly.Įither way, you need to make sure your wannabe media server meets the following specifications, which will make it capable of streaming HD video to the rest of your network.įirst, it needs either a beefy processor (2GHz dual-core processor or better) or graphics chipset that supports hardware accelerated video decoding.

While you can use your day-to-day PC or Mac as your media server, it's probably easier to press into service a dedicated machine for the task. The goal is to offload the Plex Media Server software from a power hungry standard desktop computer to a low power Raspberry Pi. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade Copy. Looking for a small form-factor PC for your media server? Zotac's range works beautifully Pi Media Server Introduction In a nutshell, this is a guide to everything you need to turn a Raspberry Pi and hard disk into a home Media Server and NAS. Now before we install the Plex Media Server software to the Raspberry Pi, we need first to ensure our operating system is entirely up to date by running the following two commands.

Pi media server