5 Ways to optimize your Plex Media Server

in today's video let's talk about five different methods you could use to optimize your plex media server now this can be either for a very powerful plex media server or something a little bit more budget-friendly the plex media server there's lots of options lots of ways to configure your own plex media server but I compiled a short list 5 to be exact of ways to help optimize your plex media server to run potentially just a little bit better now some things to keep in mind here my plex media server on a personal level actually runs on an unrated server my current server is called low key which is a very big powerful and expensive plex media server / unraised server that i built if you don't know about it I definitely recommend watching some of my videos but even though my personal server runs on unrated does not mean that these five methods that I'm talking about today cannot be used on any installation of a plex media server well almost any installation of a plex media server for example of Nvidia shield like there's only so many things you can do as far as adding on but you'll get that later ok so with that said let's jump into it number one your transcoder quality in your settings underneath your transcoder settings without having to show advanced settings you can see options to change your transcoder quality settings now for most people this is set to automatic and for the most part this should work for you automatically perfectly however there are two scenarios here where you might want to change this to optimize the way your server runs based off of your hardware so if we look at this from a budget standpoint if you built a budget server you don't have very much power backing your plex media server so transcoding files might be a daunting task for your server and even though Plex should automatically default to higher speed you can go in here and change the transcoding quality to optimize for speed so from the drop-down you would select prefer higher speed encoding now what this means is that the Plex transcoder will drop its quality just a little bit in fact you may or may not even notice it but it will drop the quality just a little bit in favor for a faster transcoding speed so let's say if you have a server and it can do like 9 transcodes and you to this now maybe you can get 10 transcodes but each one of those transcoded video files might be just a little bit lower quality now keep in mind this setting does not change hardware accelerated transcoding so if you're using a graphics card to transcode files on your plex media server this doesn't matter so don't worry about it but let's say you had a more powerful server or a super-powerful server you can also change this to prefer higher quality encoding or make your CPU hurt now this is opposite of what I just talked about meaning that the transcoder in Plex is going to up its quality of its transcoded files but to do that it will make your server work a little harder so if you choose something like make my CPU hurt you're going to get the best possible quality transcoded files possible out of your server but it is going to make your CPU hurt in doing so hence the name of it so if you have a super powerful server and you want the best possible encoded files make your CPU hurt if you have kind of a budget server you probably want to prefer the higher speed encoding number to ram transcoding now when you trance code a file on your plex media server those temporary files have to go somewhere now most of time depending on your installation those temporary files are just going to go to wherever you install the plex media server application like for example on Windows if you install it on your C Drive it's just gonna go to your C Drive however it is fairly simple to go into plex and manually set where you want your transcoding directory to be and this is where Ram transcoding can not only improve the speed of your plex media transcoder but it can also help you save the life of SSD so I really hope you don't but there is a possibility that your transcoding your media to a spinning hard drive if you're doing that great it's probably super slow but at least your hard drives plugin will go last longer than what your SSD would however if you have a little bit better server or you're a little bit smarter with the way you set it up you could right now have everything going to your SSD which means that your plex media server is transcoding very quickly because it can write those files repeatedly and read them without any kind of major delay because that's what SSDs do they go fast but transcoding to an SSD depending on how often you use your plex media server can definitely wear down that SSD a little bit faster than what it normally would have been worn down that's why Ram transcoding is a better option if you meet a few things one you have to know how to do it every operating system is different anything from FreeNAS to unread to Windows is going to take a different way of setting it up and this video is not going to tell you how to do it I personally use unrated I've set my transcode folder to /tmp and since the under a top rating system runs in memory the temporary folder is in memory so when I set - /tmp it just automatically transcodes everything to ram I have 32 gigs of ram so for the most part it works for me without issue to give you an idea idling with nothing transcoding 32 gigs of ram on my server I was using 21% ram I went in I found the largest 4k video file and I transcoded it to a 20 megabit per second file and I played four of them and I went from 21% to up to 39% so I still had plenty of headway and I was just burning in my CPU I turned off hardware accelerated transcoding for this but the point is with 32 gigs of ram i was able to transcode 4 big 4k video files loaded into RAM and still only be at 39% but at the end of the day this is exactly what Ram is meant for temporary files it's fast it's not going to break down as fast as well in an SSD would this is literally what Ram is meant to do setting your plex media server to utilize a ram disk or to utilize ram in any way possible for transcoding is going to do nothing but speed up your server and save some of your hardware from being burnt out so whatever your operating system is hop on Google maybe even look in YouTube I might even have a video on it where you can set up a ram transcoding for your plex media server number 3 background x264 encoding now this is actually kind of a new focal point for me because I started traveling and when you travel you're on an airplane you don't have Wi-Fi unless you pay for it even then it sucks and it's definitely not anything you want to rely on if you just are flying for three to four hours and you want to be able to watch something on your plex media server without having to worry about any kind of connectivity issues basically the last three times I have traveled I have taken a tablet and I have used plex sync to download episodes of a TV show that I was watching normally Star Trek and then I would have those files on me so I could launch plex and just play them locally but I've actually been in a situation where I used the Plex sink feature I you know downloaded basically a season or a set of episodes and because I did it a little bit too early I ended up watching most of those and I had to go back through almost last minute to get those downloaded before I left for the airport well in your transcoder settings in your server if you click on advanced you will see the option to change some of these settings for this background processing now your settings go anywhere from ultra-fast to very slow and just like the previous settings that I talked about for your transcoder as far as making your CPU hurt or preferring higher speed it changes the quality in exchange for speed I have the benefit of having a powerful server so even though my thing was last minute I was able to get an entire season of Star Trek downloaded and really not that much time however if you're somebody who has maybe a slower server you can always change this to a faster setting so if you're downloading things for traveling or for your kids maybe their cartoons it doesn't matter how good the quality is you just need your kids something to have something to watch while you're on the road or something like that you can change this to be faster if you need to in order to save yourself some time but of course on the opposite end of that spectrum if you're willing to wait or you just have a powerful server you can change this to a slower setting and you can have higher quality video files transcoded and then sync to your mobile device and you just enjoy a better quality because of it now this will affect a couple things your mobile sync of course like I was talking about but it will also affect your optimized videos optimized videos or where you can go in there and basically pre transcode a video file if for whatever reason you know that someone's going to be watching something you don't want to transcode it on the fly you know that they're gonna be watching a video file at like 2 megabits per second you can go on there and you can pre transcode and optimize that video file for them that way they're not reliant on real-time transcoding capabilities that's not part of this video I'm just saying that's one of the things that this setting will affect so depending on your setup faster server or enough time change this if you want better quality or if you want faster speed number for generate video preview thumbnails now again going into the settings of your plex media server inside the library tab you have the option to generate video previews thumbnails now these preview thumbnails are in my opinion a very very great feature however they do come at a cost the first cost of course being that Plex has to analyze literally every part of this video to generate these little you know video thumbnails of little sections of your movies or TV shows and it adds an enormous amount of space to your Plex meta data directory every little video thumbnail has to be a little picture if you want these video thumbnails and you're willing to have an SSD or a storage medium for your metadata big enough in order to handle these extra files then you can go in there you can either a set it's run as a scheduled task at a certain time when you know your server is not being used or be you can schedule to run automatically every single time a media sources added I personally have a powerful server so I just wanted to start working on video preview thumbnails every time I add something to my server so that's the way I have it set up on the complete opposite into the spectrum though if you maybe have a more budget-friendly server or just not enough storage space or you know just not enough horsepower to want to deal with these you know thumbnails previews then you can completely turn this off you do miss out on the feature of having able to scroll through your timeline and see basically a thumbnail of what would be at that if you clicked on it but in return the resources of your server one of you use to generate these and you wouldn't have to you know go for that extra space for your Plex made a data directory in order to store these so again depending on your server setup you could either a make them run all the time or be turn them off completely of course you can also just run them as a scheduled task it all really depends on your server but again it's still a good focal point and a way to optimize your planks media server and last but not least number five Plex metadata being stored on an SSD I know this might seem extremely obvious to people but it's still something that pops up from time to time and I feel like I have to say it again just like the transcoding directory being hosted on your ram or even an SSD over a spinning platter hard drive having all of your Plex metadata stored on an SSD is a humongous speed boost for your plex media server I mean it's it's huge ok it's a huge upgrade like literally think back to the time or we had spinning hard drives running our Windows operating system and then you upgrade some old garbage computer running a hard drive you upgrade that to an SSD and then all the sudden it boots like five times faster and like your entire world changed on the speed of this computer because you upgraded it to an SSD this exact same experience can be had if you're running Plex off of a spinning hard drive now again this all depends on your setup but me personally I run a single dedicated SSD just for Plex with unrated that means I install all of my Plex metadata and everything to a single SSD and that SSD is used for nothing else not for transcoding not for any other app data any other files it has literally only used for Plex if you're on Windows you can install Plex to your C Drive to where it runs off of an SSD but you can still assign a separate Plex SSD in Windows to run completely separate from your boot OS SSD which is really great and here comes another benefit from doing this if you just happen to run two SSDs in RAID one where you basically have an exact copy of all your files being stored on these two SSDs if by any chance one of your SSD fell then you can go in there you can swap out that SSD and save all of your metadata without having to worry about any kind of initial backups I always recommend backing up your stuff but if you lose all that metadata then all your watch history and everything you've done it all gets erased if you have to start anew it's not necessarily the end of the world it's more of a personal preference but all those poster arts that you changed everything you download configured matched all that can get wiped and if you have a large library that could be a huge undertaking to get you back to where you were before is not only a giant step in performance but also is a way to add a little bit of redundancy to your Plex metadata so you could possibly avoid some data loss in the future so that's it for today five different ways that you could use to optimize your plex media server to run a little bit better depending on your situation do you have a super-powerful plex media server great maybe you want some of these higher quality settings to be changed or maybe you just have a server that's a little bit more on the budget-friendly side which is completely ok but if it's not running as fast as you want or need it to hopefully some of these settings that I gave you today will allow you to change that so now I ask the audience if you have any additional ways to optimize or make likes run better please post them down in the comments down below I would love to hear some of your thoughts on ways to optimize your plex media server as always thank you for watching like and subscribe below and have yourself a great day but RAM is meant for them oh Jesus

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 256,437

Keywords: plex media server, plex 4k hdr, streaming media, plex hdr support, plex 4k movies, plex 4k transcoding, plex app, plex server, plex media server setup, how to, plex media server build, plex server build, plex media server setup linux, optimize, plex 4k server, plex 4k transcoding nas, Byte My Bits, Plex

Id: F_Pc_4SahWg

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020