I see this a lot. I've never understood my peers need for complex "plex server" (or related) setups. Why not just store the files on the hard drives of your normal computers? 200TB is why, I guess, but this is hardly typical nor does it require "plex". I do just fine with a handful of computers with ~30 TB between them and some network shares. No "maintainance" required.
Plex actually requires 0 maintenance, it’s the radarr/sonarr bit which deals with content acquisition that’s often a hassle. (Still infinitely better than having to manually choose and download torrents)
Even a network share would take more work to set up than Plex.
Why Plex? Easy set up, vastly better UI than a network share, works from outside the home. I travel often and frequently benefit from the transcoding feature when dealing with shitty hotel wifi. Friends love it too.
Playing directly from a regular computer isn’t a very good option due to shit format support.
How is playing directly from a computer not a good option? All of my computers on my network are sharing all of their drives all the time and I just go on to other computers drives to get things and I double click them and they play on every computer on my network from Linux to Mac to Windows from H264, 65, vp9, av1... Anything.
