Going to visit family for holidays in about 1 week, and decided to get them setup with a file server and Plex streamer. My main consideration is to have a simple always on server that they never need to manage, which is why initially I thought of commercial NAS, but Qnap/Synology are really expensive.

 

I have big loud servers I use myself, but I need  suggestion for something I can purchase which will run unRaid, have at least 4 drives, and be able to transcoding, in a small form factor and low power/noise. Is there any such device? Something like HP Microserver comes to mind.

 

I dont have a lot of time as I'm travelling next week!

I’m confused, are they going to have local content on the server? If so why the need to transcode? You can stream content through Kodi from a server like unraid, you don’t even need Plex just something that runs kodi. Any mid tower with a motherboard/celeron amd some ram should do just fine. 

Yes I will give them local content,  their Internet speeds are not great. For streaming clients my plan is to buy 2 FireTv sticks, it seems like the easiest UI to use. Needs are very simple, just a tv and no speaker system. I have used FireTv/stick myself with both Plex and Kodi, Plex has a much easier UI IMO, but it does transcode many formarts like avi. 

 

Do you have a suggestion for a prebuilt box I could buy, add ram/hdd and unraid key and be done? Also this is going on a flight with me, which is why I said the SFF. A mid tower is not going to work. 

There are no pre built boxes that I know of. You could possibly order all the parts you need on Amazon and have them shipped to your parents house and assemble it there. Kodi can play virtually any format without the need to transcode. If you are determined to use plex then you'll need to figure out how many concurrent streams and and what resolution you want to do it to determine your CPU needs, but I would say at least a quad core i5 up to perhaps a quad core i7.

Or your going to have to Pre-Transcode everything you give them so its ready to go without the need to Transcode anything. 

 

Use the Optimize feature in Plex and copy to a drive so its ready to go or you can use something like Handbrake and Encode the files to an AppleTv or something of the sort standards so its simpler.