I never understood why people bother with he complexity and load of Plex. I just NAS/SMB/NFS everything and play back in full glorious bitrate without any experience ruining transcodes.
I haven't used Plex before. This seems like a good point to me.
Is transcoding really a needed thing on a home LAN? Unless you're streaming to a Sega Game Gear or some shit, I imagine decoding performance is a non issue for anything that isn't ancient, and bandwidth is plenty abundant in network for whatever absurd quality you want, even over wireless.