Thanks to a friend’s detailed “cutting the cable” post, I re-examined Plex Media Server (PMS) as a means of sharing/accessing my vast library of movies/photos/music. In short, PMS is now significantly more polished than it was a few years ago. For anyone with media files spread across multiple systems including Apple/OS X/iOS, PMS is a very easy to used and polished means of making all media available everywhere. The only caveat I discovered is that PMS can be quite resource intensive (read CPU/RAM) when transcoding large format video (1080p). To solve this issue, I created Linux (Ubuntu Server) guests using Virtualbox and placed upper limits on real resource utilization for the PMS servers. Everything now works like a charm! Note that both Plex and VirtualBox are open source/no cost for personal use.
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