Dee Syphur

Budget is <$1,000. Unsure if that's an overkill budget for this or not tbh. Also I was reading the Plex help page for this as well. Can I get an ELI5 for what transcoding is?

Hey y'all! So I recently decided that I want to finally backup all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays and make a Plex server for my house. I have built and set up close to a dozen computers for myself, friends, and family, but never a server. They've primarily been gaming/casual usage cases so that's kind of all I know. I am hoping to get some advice for building a small server pc to just stream within my house. At most there will be 4 simultaneous streams with a more realistic usage case of 2 streams at once. What are good processors for my scenario and would I need a GPU for encoding? And are there any other components that are essential for running a server? Thank you in advance!