How to Build a Plex Media Server!! | ThatModernDude

what's up guys Nick here back with another video and today I want to talk about plex media servers more importantly how you build one what you need what you don't need and really how simple it is so let's go so after that really enthusiastic intro let's sort of cut down to the basics what is a plex media server if you didn't catch in my other videos I kind of mentioned it a little bit flex is an app free to use that basically categorizes your entire personal media collection into a Netflix like experience really and for people such as myself who's kind of gotten a bit sick of I guess Netflix and not having all the content that I want to watch at the one time I decided to sort of make my own Netflix of sorts and that's where Plex comes in so the two things you really need for a plex media server is a computer a piece of machinery with a CPU and something to store all your media on so a hard drive and so that's pretty simple so when I so first I'm using plaques which is like four or five years ago I just pretty much use what I had lying around which was this beast of a laptop it's nothing special it's just an old HP laptop that I was using at the time for me or whatever it worked why it had a hard drive and it had a CPU as all computers through as time went on obviously my media collection or as with anyone's the computer got old and it started to charge but why would it start chugging if all I'm doing is watching movies and TV shows why it does the computer gets slow that's because Plex and this is what makes it such a great app transcodes your videos what does that mean so transcoding is basically when a media file isn't supported by what you're watching on save for instance my android TV can't process certain types of audio streams what Plex will do is realize that it can't handle that audio stream and it will transcode it to be something that the TV can read which is very CPU intensive but for those of you starting out if you have a laptop lying around why it's a good option you know cost no money but I would not spend money on the laptop news up as a purpose-built plex media server you might think is good idea at the time but later on you're going to run into bottlenecks now this is why building your own sort of dedicated media server is probably the easiest and the safest option so what do we need when we're building one well you really need to look at three important factors that is the CPU because obviously this needs to be powerful enough to handle all your media files and you want to kind of you to prove yourself you need to think of the case will it hold enough hard drives to store my media but you need to keep that in mind you don't want to sort of bottleneck yourself there and then you need the motherboard obviously support those hard drives so I'm gonna back up a bit and I'm gonna show you what I do alright so this is what I've built and yes this is a hell of a lot bigger than the laptop that I just used but this is a server we want to make it look cool at the same time so why not so what have I told here so the case is a fractal design casing to r5 the reason I got this case more statistical one sort of blends in it's not too showy but it still looks kind of cool nice and sleek but also because it comes standard with eight hard drive cages which is really great for me because I've quite a large menu like we're currently only using four of them 24 terabytes but obviously I've got some expansion there that's really important you want to buy a case that you can expand with that's why it's so big one of the hot tips is when building media so the most money you spend on a single part other than the hard drives we should be the most singularly in which should be the most expensive singular item yeah that makes sense that you buy it would be the case so now this case I think came in to roughly 170 dollars I'll link it down below along with everything else I mentioned in this video and I think that's a great bargain so because a gaming machine we've really only worried about the harddrive space getting in close up the motherboard oh how does an Asus b250 motherboard why do I get that one because it was under $100 and he came to roughly $89 and it came standard with six size support in terms of CPU I'm problem with a core i5 quad core 7th gen I think the exact model down why I chose up because you get really good bang for your buck its quad core which is great for transcoding and more cores the better the faster it's going to work everything else is pretty standard 16 gig of ram not too important I'm running Windows 10 on this bad boys but nothing else apart from Plex Media Server so whatever so you see it's just to be safe one really important thing that I recommend to all of you is that you buy a fast SSD I'm using an m2 samsung just saw your eyes on the plex media server itself and all this sort of metadata so the images and all that sort of stuff it just makes you server load incredibly quickly and across all of your devices it also helps with transcoding speeds if that's the drive that you use it on this isn't by all means a be-all and end-all you can sort of chop and changes to your heart's desire I've gone with a really large case because it feels safer to have all this extra space if I want to upgrade more bit but you can buy a 20 case as well even if it's got one or two hard drive bays whatever like you just put massive hard drives in them solution easy but for those of you out there I would recommend this climate bill it's relatively cheap case under $200 it looks awesome the motherboard is cheap as chips 80 bucks the cpu again is on the 300 the hard drives whatever you can chop and change for whatever you got lying around in there at the time being so in terms of starting and building your own plex media server my recommendations would be start with what you've got if you don't want to spend money don't a laptop or any sort of computer lying around will serve you very well but if you want to invest in this is definitely the way to go there's no bloatware nothing no crap on this computer literally just runs with plex media server that is all and I've had no hiccups this theme plays all my four came in your files I can play them anywhere in the world on any device and it worked perfectly anyway guys that's about it for this video if you enjoyed watching hit that thumbs up button down below and don't forget everything I mentioned in this video the case if you Harger all that is linked down below in the description if you want to check it out don't forget to subscribe if you want to see my latest videos hit me up in the comments below with anything maybe I miss may be things like to try that could improve my server build or any questions until the next video I'll catch you guys later

Channel: That Modern Dude

Views: 61,115

Keywords: plex media server build, server build, server, media, media server, mediaserver, plex, plex media server, computer, movies, tv, pc, pc build, movie collection, personal netflix, how to, tutorial, instructional, vlog, personal experience, flex media, plex media, australia, australian, review, cpu, intel, seagate, asus, motherboard, ram, gpu, usb, fractal design, NAS, storage, building old computers, nick carter, plex live tv, plex media server setup, google, android, google home plex, plex (software)

Id: YnHI4oe867U

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2017