Back in the day, I liked to watch Cory Williams and his SMP Films / Mr Safety / DudeLikeHELLA / TheMeanKitty channels, even if they were sometimes completely ridiculous, they were still fun to watch. When he started to Vlog it was still entertaining. The whole “Moving to Alaska” part was still interesting and weird, and I still liked to watch the videos. For TheMeanKitty, in 2018, Loki and then in 2020 Sparta died, so the channel, for the lack of a better word, was dead as well. But his main Channel then only revolved around doing Family vlogs, then game some Game stuff with Motion Capturing and Game Dev. Moving back to Oklahoma and so on. It wasn’t interesting to me anymore, and I slowly lost track. I am glad that he now looks happy, and I wish him all the luck.
Another one would be Joshua Weissman. I really liked his initial content, his recipes and guide videos on how to do all sorts of things, like fermentation, making sourdough, pickling and so on. But, as soon as the channel took off and he hired more people, it became a bit weird. The “witty” comments, many times at the expense of his employees, got annoying. I also don’t have that much of a Problem with innuendos, but this was overdone at some point. Looking now at the channel videos, it has heavily changed from the food being the focus to Joshua in the Thumbnails. This might be more of an “algorithm” thing, which I get to soon, but I still don’t like it. But soon after that, it got more into the direction of “competition” content, the “But better” part, in which he makes some fast food items at home. While it was still interesting to watch, I think it is misleading because even Joshua struggled with the time to make all that stuff in the time to get it, and that, as a professional chef. Not to mention that the usual other time factors like preparations and clean-up aren’t factored in as well. Soon after that, it got the MrBeastification.
Around 2 years ago, the channel and videos shifted to the “I did this” or “I tried that” with him basically going around and trying food stuff, rating them, and practically complaining about them most of the time. Funny enough, the last 22 videos (practically the last 10 months) all start with “I”. Because of Popular demand, he also added his recipe channel, but, for me, I already lost interest.
I think the time I unsubscribed was when the interview came out, in which he basically said, “yeah, the purpose was to find something that worked and do that all the time”, which means that his style of content wasn’t going anywhere. Then also came out the allegations of him treating his employees like shit and stealing recipes. This all led to me not being interested anymore.
It really depends on what you need.
Plex relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play thing, otherwise the server needs to transcode it into something that is playable.
Which means that when you curate your library in a way that is completely compatible with your clients, you can run a Plex server on a raspberry pi. If you don’t, and you need transcoding then you also need the hardware to do so.
This also depends on what needs to be transcoding, a 4K video will require a lot more performance than a 1080p Transcode.
Then, you need to distinguish between the different types of transcoding, when you have a Plex Pass, you can use a GPU for the transcoding, otherwise your CPU needs to do that.
In the last 1-1.5 years, the beelink mini pc with the N100 CPU was really popular because it was small, fairly cheap and had a iGPU in it that could even handle a couple 4K transcodes.
So, the first thing I would do is check what your requirements are. Do you have Plex Pass to be able to utilise hardware transcoding? Maybe also look in other players like Plezy for getting better compatibility than the official Plex app.