FreeBSD & Emby Server in VMWare

[Guardian Hope 117]

At the moment, my Emby Server locally is about as useful as a paperweight - not binding to any ports in Windows (see http://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/29931-emby-refusing-connections/) and since it seems like there is going to be no easy fix to the problem as it has apparently only cropped up once or twice before I was left with three choices: wait it out; spin up a W2K12 R2 Server for Emby; or look at lightweight alternatives such as FreeBSD and the *nix family. A quick look showed me that FreeBSD seems to be the most stable when it comes to Emby out of the group.

 

So just a few questions:

 

1. How "lightweight" is FreeBSD (this isn't a big issue considering I've run many W2K12 R2 DC servers at once on the system but this is a stopgap measure);
2. How reliable is FreeBSD and Emby (in 4+ years which takes us all the way back to MediaBrowser, something like this has never come up where Emby became unusable);
3. The RAID storing the media files and the metadata are NTFS but 99% of the time that isn't a problem because they can be mapped as CIFS drives but will FreeBSD Emby Server pick up on the Windows Emby Server's metadata once its configured?
4. I use Kodi mainly with Emby now. Any issues with H.264 and HEVC/H.265 which nearly all the content is in?

I figure the only issue will be that Emby Connect isn't really going to be usable unless I set VMWare to let FreeBSD use the VMNet that's assigned to allow the physical routers know that there's a "separate" machine on the network rather than just using the host machine's local IP to the VMNet. I also assume that it's not going to carry over any watch information which doesn't matter considering I was asked to do a complete clean install of Emby on Windows anyways which wiped that out.