My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
It’s an Athlon 64 3800. It has no encode or decode cores for anything, sucks for software encode and decode, and burns 90W to do so. An RPi5 is literally almost three times the CPU performance at like 1/20th of the power budget and would probably run Plex better. Recycling is the best option.
Plex supports Direct Play — no encode/decode needed if the network is decent and the client (like Roku or AppleTV) supports the file format sent by the server.