Plex Server on old Mac mini mid 2007 model

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1

Hello
I plan to buy a Mac mini A1176 with the following specs:
Core2Duo 2Ghz T7200
4GB DDR2
Intel GMA 950 64 MB
HDD 120 GB
I will probably install windows 10 on it.
I want to install Plex Server on it and watch a TV Show from my work computer during my lunch brake.
1. Will I be able to watch a 1080p or 720p movie with this kind of hardware?
2. Will it be capable of sustaining streaming on two computers at once two 720p movies?

2

looksatcalendar

uhuh… right, sure. lol

3

First thing: If you can help it, don’t buy it. Mac mini’s are great but prior to the 2008 models they aren’t worth anything anymore. But because it has an apple logo on it everyone wants 4000 dollars for it. Not worth it.

Look around on craigslist for junk sales or at recycle centers. They aren’t hard to find for free, they’re just hard to find in the first place. Then all you need is a CPU replacement and you’re good to go.

Good luck.

Or you could get a G4 to do the same thing

4

It will not cost me an arm and a leg it`s 30$.
Please stay on topic guys.

5

Aight thats worth it. You’ll also wanna pull that chip out and put an 8600 in it if you can. I think the 2007’s support them. Might double check that.

6

If using the plex media player application, you will have no issue with streaming the video on two different computers.

Now where you will run into issues is using the web portion of the server where it has to actively transcode the media, overall this should not be a problem for one device steaming at a time or one device on the web player while the other uses the plex application.

1 Like
7

If the video format is playable by the remote device at the bit-rate over the network it is on, and no transcoding is involved - you’ll be OK.

But that box is WAY too old to do real time transcoding, so you can forget about it downsampling for streaming over the internet, negotiating codecs for other content that can’t play natively on remote machines, etc.

You really want something with h.264 and ideallly h.265 acceleration built in, even if the clock speed is slower, as those instructions help transcoding performance a lot.