Choosing Hardware For Your Plex Server

[Music] hello and welcome to lovey's customs today i'm going to be going over some of the things you're going to need to think about when it comes to the hardware that you put in your plex server most of this is straight from plex's own support articles and some of it is from my own experience when thinking about what type of hardware you're going to need in your plex server there are some big things you need to think about and that's whether you're going to be transcoding your source files and we'll go over that more later so are you going to be transcoding or not and then if you are transcoding are you going to be mostly using hardware or software encoding and a few more things that we'll be going over so here we are on one of plex's support articles the first thing is when it comes to the operating system you can pretty much put it on anything even a netgear nighthawk x10 router nasa's linux mac os windows nvidia shield and then when it comes to operating systems it's pretty lenient windows 7 that's you know that's pretty old for the cpu it's mainly going to depend on if you're transcoding and if you're going to be using software encoding and so we'll go ahead and right here they have a link to another article what kind of cpu do i need from my server and here are some of the things you're going to need to consider what kind of plex apps will be connecting so uh android ios you know plex media on the web a roku device you know what kind of devices are you going to be using how many apps will be playing at the same time will access be local remote or a combination will you be using a lot of content with subtitles so right here they kind of explain about these up here so like the first one what kind of plex apps will be connecting to it says the majority of other plex apps will require transcoding at least sometimes and when you're playing locally plex never usually has to transcode and that really depends again on the device because here in my apartment we have a roku tv and it transcodes all the time whereas i have a computer hooked up to my tv in the living room and running it from the web player of plex it is a direct stream for all my blu-ray rips and so then right here direct player direct stream that's pretty much you're streaming the source file there is no transcoding it's just exactly what you would if you were physically on the machine remote access does require transcoding a lot uh unless it's like music somehow a lot of times if i'm streaming to my phone uh even on cell data i still get the full flack audio and then subtitles uh they have to be encoded into the image and so that requires of course transcoding the big thing for me is this guideline right here that they have pass mark which uh is we will look at us in a second uh they have scoring you know cpus will have an average score and you know you can run the software and see exactly what you have but if you're if you don't have any of your hardware yet you can take a look at this and see you know what type of like if you're just doing music then this isn't really gonna matter too much you could put almost any cpu in and would be fairly you know it would be acceptable whereas if you're doing any type of video you need to have kind of a goal of how many streams do you want so when i first built my plex server i had a goal of 4 720p streams so we can see here 1500 pass mark score so 1500 times 4 would be 6 000 so what we're gonna do here i ended up getting actually let me use the fine feature uh i ended up getting a 2200 g by amd and it has an average score from you know users who have ran the the benchmark uh of 6776 which meets my need of 6000 so that's when i went ahead and got because it also had has integrated graphics which means i didn't have to buy a video card and i i wasn't really looking to do any type of hardware and coding i was strictly wanting to do software encoding after a few years i upgraded the cpu to a spare amd ryzen 5 1600x just sitting around and so i knew it was going to be a lot better just because it's the same generation and it has more cores and more threads so i've never ran the test with that cpu but if we go back over here 1600 x you can see that the average is about 13 000. that's about six 1080p streams at one time which is more than enough for what i use so now i wanted to talk about hardware encoding and that's pretty much the graphics processor in your computer whether it be an igpu you know integrated interior cpu or a dedicated graphics card that you put in your pcie slot so here they kind of have you know why should you know pros and cons of using hardware accelerated streaming pros would be more videos can be streamed at the same time videos can start streaming faster and buffer less high quality videos especially 4k and stuff can stream more smoothly by offloading cpu intensive transcoding tasks to dedicated hardware video streaming has less of a performance impact on your computer the reason why i don't is because the output quality of the video generally lower and you know blurry blocks you know stuff like that so some some rare video formats may not play correctly on certain devices it it really depends i'm not sure which formats they're talking about but that is something to think about and here they pretty much say any intel cpu second generation or newer with quick sync will work nvidia dedicated graphics cards that have the gtx i've found out the hard way that if it has gt in it and not gtx it doesn't have the nvec encoder that nvidia uses for hardware encoding amd they they pretty much have this right here saying our hardware transcoding system has technical support for many dedicated amd graphics cards but we haven't done official full testing on those support for amd gpus is provided as is and your mileage may vary it is recommended that you use intel quick sync video or a dedicated nvidia gpu i forgot to mention if you're wanting to do plex arcade then hardware encoding is the only way that plex will do that so just keep that in mind all right and so right here they say ram uh doesn't really require anything more than two gigabytes and on some like linux based installs it would run less i'd highly suggest you put at least four gigabytes of ram in your plex server i initially had eight but i have since then upgraded to 16 gigabytes not because plex was needing it but because i started doing other server type stuff on my plex server so storage is going to be a very something you're going to really have to think about i originally just had a one uh 128 gigabyte ssd for the operating system and some miscellaneous programs and then a single four terabyte hard drive for all my media i quickly outgrew the one four terabyte hard drive so then i put in a second four terabyte hard drive for a total of eight you know how the whole formatting and there's the whole thing but it's they're more like 3.6 terabytes each and not four terabytes but now let's see i'm actually going to take a look here on my server which is sitting right next to i do all my gaming so one four terabyte hard drive has 300 gigabytes left i did some housekeeping and got rid of some old stuff duplicates and whatever and then the second four terabyte hard drive has only 105 gigabytes left out of four terabytes so as you can see i'm already running out of space again because i'm i'm constantly adding new tv shows music movies and even pictures to my server and here we'll come to something else you need to consider is the motherboard when i first built this i was just going as cheap as possible when it came to the parts because at the time i just didn't really have a lot of money and but i thought plex was a really cool idea so the motherboard that i got only has one fan connector like case fan connector on the motherboard and it only has four sata ports meaning since i have a that ssd the blu-ray optical drive which we'll get to here in a second and then the two four terabyte drives right now i can't add any extra i have to fully replace my hard drives which is going to cost a little bit more i could get another motherboard but at this point i've already invested so much to the actual content side so i'm probably just gonna end up upgrading to two eight terabyte drives because i don't want to have to reinstall and do my server all over again so let's go ahead and talk about optical drives depending on how you obtain your content you may need an optical drive so like if you're if you have a large music collection and you're ripping that you'll need at least a cd drive but you know a dvd drive is 20 bucks so you might as well i have a blu-ray drive and i can do up to 4k blu-rays i don't do 4k blu-rays just because they take up a lot more space than blu-ray and a lot more hardware encoding a standard definition 4k requires a score of 12 000 which is guess what just barely enough for my processor to do a single encode so anyways if you're going to be doing like if you just have a large like an older dvd collection then you know a dvd player is fine if you're going to be doing blu-ray and 4k blu-ray then of course you'll need to get an appropriate drive if you're just obtaining your content digitally like a lot of people have been using google drives unlimited photos or whatever i know there's a big old thing about them stopping that but a lot of people have been looking in the plex because you can host all of your pictures on your plex server and you just pull them up whenever you want they used to have a camera upload feature so like whenever you took a picture something it would automatically put it on the server like upload it to your server but for whatever reason they stopped doing that and that's about the time when i was thinking about doing that with plex as well so that kind of sucks so with uh your case i started out with a cheap 20 micro atx case one intake fan one exhaust fan you know super flimsy very cramped but i recently upgraded to a cooler master silencio 400 with the noise canceling side panel the case has more airflow but because of the sound dampening panels it also kind of insulates it in there but it keeps it really quiet plus i have noctua and be quiet fans to help keep it nice and quiet and i also have a noctua cpu cooler as well and also it is very hard to find cases that have a optical drive slot nowadays you can it took me a while to to get on this case because all the cases that i wanted before this were just they had no way of putting an optical media another thing is if you are going to be streaming outside of your network whether it be to your own devices or adding your friends to have access to your content uh then internet is going to be a big thing to think about i unfortunately only have 500 megabits down and 20 up just because i am in an apartment and that's the best i can get so i actually have to in the server settings limit how much each external stream gets i think i have it set to like four megabits so you have to keep that in mind as well if you're just streaming in home then it's probably not that big of a deal as long as you have at least 100 megabit network and then so that kind of wraps it up what do you guys think about the specifications needed are you planning on building your own server and you know what are you thinking of putting into it and if you already have a server what kind of specs do you got and real quick before we end you know just if you liked it thumbs up if you didn't like it thumbs down if you want to check out patreon i do have one down in the description you know if you want to help support the channel and with that i want to say thank you for watching and i will see you guys in the next one

Channel: Levy's Customs

Views: 32,128

Keywords: plex, plex server, plex media server, server

Id: AKHlfmWzLb4

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021