Right now I have Channels running on a dedicated Windows 10 machine with a Celeron J3455 4Gigs of RAM and a small 32Gig SSD. I also run Plex off of it. It all works ok with and external drive hooked up to USB3.0. But it will never get Windows updates due to the small drive. Now I have a new Mac Mini with the i5, 8Gigs Ram and 512 SSD which I use once in awhile for light work. Email, web surfing, etc. 90% of the time it is on doing nothing. I was thinking of moving everything off my dedicated Windows 10 box to the Mac Mini due to the better processor. Anyone see any problems with doing this since it would no longer be a dedicated machine? I remember using Windows Media Center on a non dedicated machine and there were viewing problems when I was using the computer while someone was watching TV or a recording. This i5 is so much more powerful than the old Q6600 from my first machine, and obviously more powerful than that Celeron J3455 I am using now.
We use a 2013 i7 Mac Mini for Channels DVR that is shared with my son for video editing without contention issues. I will say the 2013 Mac Mini was a dog in general running the recent Mac OS versions until we upgraded the HD to a SSD and increased memory to 8GB. Now it performs better then new. Since the hardware upgrade, the only time I've noticed Channels consuming significant resources is when it is transcoding for remote or browser based viewing (something we don't do often). Most of the time we are watching live or recorded television using local clients such as Apple TVs or iOS devices connected to our local network so Channels just hums away in the background. Your current gen Mac Mini will better support hardware transcoding so your setup should be even better.
Can't talk about Plex as I don't use it. I prefer Infuse Pro for video viewing.
If you're taking about 2018 model, it should handle Channels, Plex and your other work with ease.
Thanks for the input and yes ClubChannels it is the 2018 Model. It will be nice to clear out my desk area!
I feel like I'm reading my own post lol. I too had an old win10 machine with the q6600. Found out that my laptop had a pretty decent 4th gen i5 that could do quicksync so I switched to that, but then I just bought a mac mini and now have channels running on it along with plex. I plan on using it everyday while still running these servers.