It’s certainly possible to spend thousands of bucks on NAS drives, “endpoints” and other hardware for your home media server. There are limitations to installing Plex on a desktop PC or a laptop-namely, you’ll need to keep it running whenever you want to stream media-but it’s a great, low-effort way to see what all the fuss is about. In minutes, you can simply install Plex Media Server on a Mac or Windows PC, pick some folders filled with music, videos or other media, and start streaming away.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need a Raspberry Pi to set up a home media server. I’m no expect at building PCs, but I had my first media server up and running on a Raspberry Pi in only a few hours.

I then tossed some old MP3s and home video files on the memory stick, and before I knew it, my unused Raspberry Pi had turned into a media server. Mounting an 8GB USB thumb drive (I decided to start small until I knew what I was doing) on the Pi turned out to be a little trickier, although I even had that licked after another 45 minutes or so.

There are plenty of online tutorials on how to install Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi, and within an hour or so I had Plex up and running.

Building a plex media server