Looking for some advice regarding options for the home media center.

I'm running a NAS that has Plex server happily running on it but I noticed when playing videos on end devices it transcodes often and the transcoding is slow on the NAS which seems to be a common issue.

I'm looking to offload that work. I was thinking of setting up a SFF/MiniITX PC or piece of hardware that does transcoding well and simply install the Plex app and target the Plex server for data. I have a spare GPU I can use already if necessary. I also saw there are devices like the NVIDIA shield. I was thinking for this device it would simply need some GPU w/NVENC or Intel CPU w/QuickSync. Am I missing any options?

If I do go with the SFF/MiniITX build I would need a remote. I was thinking maybe the FLIRC receiver and a legacy remote. Any better options for that?

Lastly does it make sense to skip the Plex server and mount the media directly on either the SFF or NVIDIA Shield, sync the data every so often, and then transcode locally off faster disks? If so is it easy to get a shell or OS-level access on the Shield?

#media #mediapc #sff #nas #plex #miniitx #NVIDIA #nvidiashield #flirc #intel #transcoding #homelab #selfhosted #selfhosting

I'm considering replacing my about 10-year old off-the-shelf #mediaPC mostly for power draw reasons. Does anyone have recommendations for cheap #miniPC options, probably running #debian and the following: #kodi #sabnzbdplus #sickbeard (or whatever replaced it I guess) #samba with one or two large external HDDs (to replace the 4 in there now, totalling 8TB), preferably with VGA and analog audio out options instead of just HDMI or DP?