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format wise the stuff i have tends to be .mkv or .avi (less common)
What qualifies as a big library? I won't be using plex for photos or music so won't encounter the same problem that @Velocio had
So I could use something like this combined with something like this this
If so, that's the hardware taken care of but software?
gillies-
Yes! That's a great combination, and that NUC will do hardware transcoding great (the CPU supports it).
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For the NUC I'd see if you can stretch slightly more and get an 8th Gen processor one or later. They're quite a bit more powerful for not much of an increase in cost.
My library has something like 8,000 tv shows and 1,000 movies and is perfectly fine. I occasionally run it on my file server when I'm testing stuff and it chugs a bit on there (and can't transcode).
I run my plex server on Ubuntu (and also use it for playback) as (I think) it's a little lower OS overhead and a bit more stable. Saying that I've done a fair bit of cursing whilst mapping network drives and getting shit to work whereas it's much easier to do all of that on Windows (although someone who uses linux a lot may disagree with me there)
Velocio
aggi
Plex doesn't necessarily need transcoding, in which case you can probably just get away with a NAS. For this to be the case though you need to only be streaming to something on the same network that can direct play (and tell Plex it can) all of the different video formats you have (and if you want subtitles it may need to transcode). You also don't want too big a library.
Otherwise, I looked at this myself a while back but for the price of the better NASs that could cope with transcoding and the like you could get a cheap NAS and a better PC for the Plex side.
The benefit of this is that the storage just sits there unimpacted by the plex processing, etc and any system changes will be discrete. Your NAS in particular doesn't need to be the latest and greatest if all it's doing is acting as storage. I'm still using a 10 years old HP Microserver for mine.
For a ready made option for the plex box I'd look at the Intel NUCs although you can build something sufficient for a few hundred quid.