Building a New Plex Media Server: The Basics

depending on your needs starting a plex media server can either be really simple or a little complex so in today's video I'm going to try to explain a few things that you should take into consideration before you start to build your own server before I get too far I just want to take a moment to say that if you do find this video useful and you decide to triplex please consider using my link in the description to create your free account it will help my channel grow and give me more chances to test and review Plex related devices also I thank you now starting with the basics the first question always get from people is what kind of hardware do I really need now this is kind of a tricky question because it really all depends on each person's usage and more so what type of usage to explain what that means I should tell you how Plex works at least a basic part of it Plex is a digital media content manager that takes all of your videos music and photos and organizes them into one interface it allows you to browse and find your content easily from inside or outside of your network Plex has more client apps than I can count ranging on all types of devices things like smart TVs tablets cell phones and media streamers each of those devices get turned into a full-fledged streaming client that can take your content straight out of your home and serve it to you anywhere in the world that you have an internet connection to achieve this Plex sometimes has to convert media on the fly so that the receiving client can understand it that could either be from the format or the limitation of the internet speed but this is why Plex is so awesome and makes so many different devices compatible with all of your favorite movies and TV shows but it's also why it does take a little bit of horsepower to get the job done exactly how much CPU usage is kind of difficult to determine because there are so many variables things like what type and how many Plex apps are going to be using it at the same time or will you be using subtitles and will those clients be local or remote connections so if you're looking at piecing together a new server or maybe you have some spare parts lying around the house Plex has figured out a basic way of you calculating what kind of CPU is needed just keep in mind that the following is for desktop PCs or servers and it's only a basic guideline don't worry later on I will talk a little bit more about running plex server on different solutions like network attached storage devices or something similar to the Nvidia shield ok so the easiest way to figure out what your need is to first start out with how many transcoded streams you will be using at the same time now our transcoded stream is usually used on a remote client or small devices like phones or tablets and yeah I say usually because most clients inside your home can use something called direct play or direct stream which take very little processing power to provide so if you're planning on having two family members that live elsewhere to have access to your plex server then count that as two transcoded streams maybe you or someone living with you might want to watch TV shows at their lunch break at work or school count those two after you figure out what your maximum number of concurrent streams are now you have to match those with the CPU and the easiest way to figure this out is passmark comm on this website you can look up benchmarks for all kinds of processors and see what their pass marks score is this number is extremely useful because it will give you an idea of how many 1080p streams you can transcode at the same time when you divide that number by 2000 so for example let's say that you have an old Intel i7 3770 roque that you used in your previous gaming build since you've upgraded your computer you want to put it to good use in a standalone plex media server searching through the pass mark website you find your CPU and you quickly find out that that processor has a pass mark score of 9555 divide that by 2000 and we get a cpu with the ability to Transco around 5 streams at the same time I know what you're thinking my math is just a little bit off here and you're absolutely right however and my experience with Plex over the years I've learned that this method of figuring out what a CPU can handle is much more of a rough estimate than a hard number and rounding up a little is completely allowed I can't actually tell you a hard number because there are a lot of variables to what a server has to do to make a video file playable for you things like the codec the container bit rate and resolution all play a major role on how much work has to be done by the server in my example I actually have that i7 three seven seven zero K from an old build that I turn into a dedicated server and I have actually had streams at the same time being transcoded without any issues of buffering of course things do start to slow down a little bit when I fast forward or try to bring up a new stream but the end result is a server what's much more available streams than just five so just take that calculation I gave you as a starting point for some basic planning as for the consideration of memory on a dedicated Plex server well you don't really need a lot Plex uses more CPU than anything to work its magic so unless you need the extra RAM for something like a ZFS file system in FreeNAS eight gigabytes should be plenty for the longest time I ran 16 gigabytes on a Windows plex server and never use more than five or six gigabytes most of which was used by the operating system now one topic with a huge potential and extra cost is hard drives but really it all depends on how many movies you want to have and how good of quality they're going to be now you could rip all your blu-ray movies at full quality with no compression and end up with video files as large as 50 or 60 gigabytes that's going to add up pretty darn quick however if you want to throw a little h.264 h.265 compression in the mix bring it down around 8 gigabytes you'll be able to store a lot more media on a single drive without losing much quality just make sure to consider what kind of protection you want to have for those files and by protection I mean what happens if your drive fails without any kind of redundancy you're going to lose all that data but if you look at running a few drives in raid or something similar then you will have a little protection from that scenario I will be going too far into this topic because really it deserves a video of its own but you can find some links in the description will provide you with some more information on this topic just look for the links under the title raid and other parody options one thing I will talk about though is the use of an SSD as your primary drive in my experience using an SSD as the data folder of Plex can greatly improve your overall speed and usability and depending on what operating system you choose to your first Plex server most of the time that Plex data folder will be installed on your primary boot drive unless otherwise specified again this is a little bit more in-depth and more information can be found in the links below or the cards above on how to master your plex media server moving on the next thing to think about is your operating system now Plex can run off just about any these days but each option has its own pros and cons those pros and cons can be heavily reliant on your own ability to operate a particular system like Linux I can try to give you a starting point but I recommend you choose whichever OS you feel comfortable either running or learning it the first the most obvious option is Windows this will give you a comfortable environment where you can easily install and manage your server plus you can also easily run software rates and windows or hardware raids with the right motherboard for protection however with a Windows server you will lose some of the server performance to run the operating system itself along with the ability to run more advanced file systems like ZFS next up we have some pre-made solutions for home nast servers like FreeNAS Nass for free or unweight those are only a few examples but they all come with a number of different benefits with each you can have a better protection for your data more options to get the most out of your drives and an easy way to install free third-party apps to make your server do other things for you not to mention each of these options will use much fewer system resources than Windows will but they may need some additional RAM to run smoothly for example it's recommended for FreeNAS to have 1 gigabyte of RAM for every terabyte of hard drive space you have and that can really add up and then we have some more advanced options like ubuntu debian or Sint OS all of these work really well as a Plex server but might take some extra time and setting up or learning before you can get them working correctly so which OS you select will depend heavily on what you know or what you're willing to learn I personally started out with FreeNAS and then I moved everything over to my main Windows machine because I needed more speed and now I'm working on an unrated server but I also like to try out new things even if I don't know how to do them I just find it interesting I have made a few videos that guide you through the process of installing Plex on various systems you can check out the cards above or links below to view it now I know this next subject isn't directly related to building your server but something you want to consider is your internet package and again this will heavily depend on your needs ok so how fast you're able to actually upload will drastically affect your usage the great thing here is that Plex gives you an option to limit your bandwidth usage to external clients however you will still need to provide some kind of decent speeds to get a decent quality with that said if you have a basic internet service with 3-1 or lower megabits per second upload speed you might run into some issues I personally find a 1.5 megabit stream is about the lowest I want to go to watch a video your mileage may vary but take it into consideration your bandwidth you will be using for the rest your household a minimum of 5 megabit per second upload speed should allow you to stream 2 or maybe 3 clients at the same time at 1.5 megabits per second with a little room to spare the last thing I want to talk about is pre-built solutions and I mean things like network attached storage devices or the Nvidia shield a couple years ago I would have told you that a store-bought NAS device just didn't have enough horsepower to be a real plex server but things have come a long way and new devices are coming up all the time with some pretty good hardware specs I've personally tested Nass devices and I have tested the Nvidia shield as Plex server both with surprisingly good results so if you want to check out some easy to use and easy to set up devices I'll link to those reviews in the cards above in the description below now remember everything I've talked about today is only a starting point to building your first plex media server banks can get much more complicated and there are many ways to improve on your server so as I create them I will include more video links in the description that will expand on these methods so you can become a Plex master and again if you're thinking about trying Plex and you found this information useful please consider using my Plex link below to create your free account it all spilled my channel and I greatly appreciate it well that's it for today guys thank you for watching like and subscribe below and have a great day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 294,672

Rating: 4.8716407 out of 5

Keywords: Plex, Media, Server, Building, transcode, 101

Id: oiyBy6s8vTg

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016