Help
Just wanted to let people know of my experiences running Plex on a Dell Mini 9 if anyone is thinking of doing the same or if anyone is already doing the same.
I just got the Mini yesterday which was lucky as Dell have discontinued it. I started with a base of the following:
Inspiron 910 Intel Atom processor N270, 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD hard drive
I didn't want to pay Dell's prices for upgrades knowing I can get parts for free or cheap elsewhere, mods/upgrades I plan on doing:
2 GB RAM
Wireless N card from old Macbook
Possible IR from old Macbook
Upgrade the SSD when I find a good deal, probably 64GB
I followed the guide here to get Leopard onto the Mini and it all went perfectly without a hitch. The only thing remaining to do is fix the keyboard layout. I grabbed Ukelele and changed it up, and for the most part it is running fine. I need to do some tweaking to get a few of the functions keys working but no real rush.
Once I had that all up and running, I installed Plex 0.8 and copied over a movie and some TV Shows. Ran Plex and it told me to update to latest, which I skipped as I was on wireless and wanted to just test the thing. The menus are a little bit slower than on my Mac Mini which is to be expected but nothing drastic, just a couple of seconds to switch to movies etc.
My test 720p MKV (these are OTT as the Dell Mini has a max of 1024 x 600 resolution) file is giving me dropped frames claiming CPU at 178% and I when the bitrate goes really high the sound does stutter a bit but I was still pretty impressed it was even working at all. Xvid TV Shows that I put on there, had no dropped frames and CPU was running at the highest I saw about 46%.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has tried this out. Overall I'm really happy with the purchase and Plex is working beautifully on it, I've already wowed a bunch of people in the office with it. I might see if I can re-encode some HD video to a resolution that will work better on it to see how it plays but for now, I can use it to catch up on all my non HD content when I'm riding the bus to work
The last thing I've tried is installing some of the Plex apps.
Hulu - Works perfect
South Park - Works perfect
I only got the Dell Mini yesterday so of course haven't had enough time to really play with it or Plex but so far I'm really happy. Thanks again Elan and the rest of the team for making such a kick ass app.
