I'd like to use a Raspberry Pi as a media streaming device.
The source will likely be a Plex Media Server installed on a PC. The PC will be connected to my run of the mill basic WiFI router. The Pi will connect to the router over WiFi and output via HDMI to my Full HD TV.
How can I find out the minimal Raspberry Pi model and RAM size requirements that will enable me to get a Full HD stream with no interruptions?
As a simple client pretty much any Raspberry Pi should be capable, but the problem is finding a client that will work.
The internet suggests any Pi2 or more recent should be possible, and your server should transcode to what your device supports rather than your device struggling.
There is some extra detail about the Pi4 here.
Just to direct stream or even remux media any of them will probably do as neither of those are excessively demanding tasks. I would probably still aim for a minimum of 1GB of RAM, though more might help. The Plex server can get quite hungry when scanning media, though once that is done it should settle down.
For full stream transcoding then probably none of them are capable. The Pi4 might have changed things, but it is doubtful that it has changed enough.
The ARM platform had been improving over the years, but CPU based transcoding is hard and is still pretty much out of reach.
In the desktop world realtime CPU transcoding is still pretty difficult and Plex will by preference use GPU based hardware video decoding and encoding to do the actual work as it is easier, has minimal load in terms of CPU/GPU work due to dedicated hardware, and is generally easier to support. It is handled via "standard" operating system APIs.
Unless you can enable hardware transcoding in Plex then this will be a non-starter. It seems that the Pi4 should be able to do hardware transcoding but whether it is enabled in the Plex software is another question.
It seems that there is interest in the Plex community for this though.
