I was thinking of throwing a linux distro on it and using it as a plex media server as it is low power so i could theoretically have it running 24/7 instead of the spare laptop that i currently use.
I don't think a HTPC would be useful as I already have a smart TV hooked up to my LAN.
What do you guys think? Should i be running anything else while i use it as a media server? Do you have any alternative ideas?
smart tv's suck. you should use it as a HTPC if you can, or surveillance. or a personal cloud server. NAS is a good option too. maybe even get some multi port pcie network cards and make a pfsense router.
Yeah, my smart TV's interface is mediocre and it is probably spying on me, but it can access my media files through DLNA. This is what i use it for. Would i be able to use this motherboard as both a server and a HTPC or would that be asking too much of it?
The personal cloud / NAS solution sounds interesting. I always wanted to check out owncloud or YunoHost. I'm a noob when it comes to most of this stuff, so it would be a nice project to toy with.
Needs tidying, but I've managed to fit a second 2TB hard drive in place of the optical drive bay. Should tide me over until i want to expand and need more storage.
Plex Transcoding: I can transcode a single blu-ray stream on the fly, but it pretty much maxes out the CPU @ 370% (it has 4 cores, so 93% of the CPU total).
Very little CPU load when streaming without any transcoding, which works well for me.