The Plex Media Server is the core delivery application. It is installed directly onto Physical Host 2 (The Brawn) to ensure it has unfettered, un-virtualized access to the discrete NVIDIA GPU for hardware-accelerated transcoding.

Add the official Plex repository to your bare-metal Ubuntu instance:

echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list
curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt install plexmediaserver -y

Ensure the `plex` system user is added to the shared media group, granting it read-access to the `/mnt/data/media/` directory mapped in the nfs_fabric phase.

sudo usermod -aG media plex
sudo systemctl restart plexmediaserver

Hardware transcoding is the defining feature of “The Brawn.” It offloads the massive CPU overhead of converting media formats to the dedicated NVIDIA RTX 3050 GPU.

Navigate to Settings → Transcoder in the Plex WebUI:

1. Check Use hardware acceleration when available.
2. Check Use hardware-accelerated video encoding.
3. Hardware transcoding device: Explicitly select your discrete NVIDIA GPU from the dropdown list (do not leave this on Auto, as it may attempt to use inferior Intel QuickSync CPU graphics if present).

Transcoding generates massive temporary files. If written to the OS drive, it will rapidly destroy the NVMe's read/write endurance limits.

In the same Transcoder menu:

1. Locate Transcoder temporary directory.
2. Change the path to `/mnt/plex_cache` (The secondary, dedicated NVMe cache drive partitioned during the media_engine deployment).

Next Step: Deploy the automated hardware optimizer in Unmanic Engine.