How To Set Up A Plex Media Server On A Zimaboard

recently I did a setup video on the Zima board and today I want to cover how to set up Plex with Hardware transcoding on the device if you want to know how then watch the rest of this video and please don't forget to subscribe and like this video if you find it useful [Music] one of the things that makes the Zima board worthwhile is not only the cost but the wide variety of available apps that you can easily install on this device I'll be covering several of the apps in future videos but today I want to focus on the full setup of Plex Media Server on the Zima board including how to enable Hardware transcoding as you'll see later in the video this device with Hardware acceleration can handle quite a few streams without a whole lot of stress the first thing of course is to go to the App Store and install the Plex app just click on it and wait for it to finish though we can do these next steps in just about any order my suggestion is that you plan out where you want to store your media and copy your content to that desired location in advance if you already have it on a network storage or an external drive then we'll walk through the various options of how to access it because Plex runs isolated in a Docker container it doesn't have complete access to everything it needs to know where things are let's go through the various options of setting up USB drives SATA drives and network locations so that Plex will find your media in practice it's easier to have all the locations planned out before you go into the settings so we can do all the changes and configurations at once if you have already added a SATA drive to your system and plan on using that to store your media make sure it's been added to the system storage check the casa OS main screen under the storage manager and make sure it's part of your system storage using the files app create one or more folders on the drive to copy your movies on for best frac practice use a high level folder such as movies or content and create subdirectories under that such as TV shows movies photos so that you'll only need one entry in your Plex settings as you'll see later in the video in larger collections this simplifies things in the configuration for this SATA drive we'll be adding the entire Drive which you'll accomplish the same thing if you have a Nas or any kind of network storage and you want to add a network location go to the files app click the plus sign and select connect to network storage type the IP address of the storage device preceded by SMB colon slash slash assuming that you have a username and a password turn off Connect is guest and type in the username and password and hit connect remember that the Zima board has a bug in it so that the password can't have special characters in it see my Zima board setup video for more information on this particular issue once you're done adding all of your storage units your screen should look something like this lastly if you're using a USB drive it should have already been Auto mounted when you plugged it in and should already show as a storage device so we'll be able to configure it without any additional settings next is the most important part as this is where we actually configure Plex and tell it where these locations are and which ones we're going to use let's go back to the main Casa OS screen and click on the triple dots on the Plex app and select settings scroll down to where it says volumes and click on add on the right hand side this will put an empty box under volumes this is where we're going to actually add one or more locations that we want Plex to be able to use as a media library let's start with SATA to tell Plex that we want to use the SATA drive that we installed for the movie content click on the gray square and select a drive just highlight it and hit select it'll fill in what you need in the host box on the container field you can put any name you want to appear when we'll go through and set up Plex and anything that you want to see just make sure that it's preceded with a slash in my case I used slash movies SSD as the name so that I know when I'm looking at my listing of locations where I'm actually putting the content and remember that the name has to have a slash in front of it if your content is on a network location that we mounted earlier using the files app process is a little bit different as you can't use the gray box to actually select the location you have to type it out manually the first part of this entry under host is the same for every Network location it always starts with Slash MNT for Mount followed by the Slash the IP address of your storage unit another slash and the name of the share that's on your storage unit remember that you'll need to set this up in your files app if there's a username and password or you'll have to set that particular share to Public Access so in my case I entered slash MNT slash 192.168.0.1 24 movies again in the container name I'm going to give it the name that I want to appear in the Plex Library preceded by a slash so for me that I'll just call it slash Nas Dash movies that way I know I'm looking at my particular Nas unit and lastly to attach a USB drive the process is similar to a network share you can't use the gray box to point to it to allow Plex to use the USB drive you need to give it access to all the attached media for this entry all you need is slash media this allows access to all attached removable physical media that you plug into your USB ports for the container I'm just going to call it slash movie USB the first time you do this it may be a bit confusing but remember that any entry that starts with a slash data is a folder path any entry that starts with a slash MNT is a Mount such as Network shares and anything with a slash media is physical media okay we're almost done with the hard part we just have one more thing to do since we're already here in the settings screen let's take care of enabling the hardware acceleration so that we can use the quick sync enabled CPU for Hardware transcoding scroll down the word says devices and click on ADD in the Box type slash Dev slash dri in both the boxes and save the configuration at this point you need to reboot the entire zema board I found that I needed to reboot the entire device for it to properly detect the hardware enabled CPU and remember that Hardware transcoding is only available if you have a Plex pass you'll not be able to enable it in the next section if you don't have a Plex pass now that you've rebooted it's time to set up and configure Plex go ahead and click on the Plex icon to launch it you'll be prompted to either log in or create an account if you don't have one in my case I'm already logged in so I'm just going to need to select with the user you'll now be launched into the server setup give your new server a name and you can leave the check box in the connect to the media outside the home enabled but I wouldn't recommend using this feature and use a VPN for best security practice for me is I use tailscale I don't do any port forwarding on my router at all I'll leave any links to videos that I've done on using tailscale if you're interested in finding out more information hit next and then select add library and select the media type give it a name and click on next here you can add one or more folders depending on how you have your media laid out if you click on browse for the media folder we should now see all the movie locations that we created earlier clicking on movies USB shows me what devices are on my USB such as the USB drive called video files clicking on the nas movies shows me what's on my Nas storage location and selecting on movies SSD shows me the content of the SATA drive that we set up earlier we can see this different subfolders that are on the SSD and since I'll be adding MP4s I'll just select that and click on add to library we should now see the library listed you can repeat this as many times as you need to to add more folders to this library or you can just create separate libraries depending on the type of content you have for example if you have a MP4s located in a bunch of different places you can add multiple folders to that one library but if some of your movies are MP4s and some are mkvs you might want to create a separate location for mkvs just to keep things separate the only other thing you really need to do is to set the server settings to use the hardware transcoding to do that go into the server settings and make sure that the use Hardware acceleration when available is checked save your settings and you should be good to go this option may not be available to you if you do not have a Plex pass now let's give it a test to see how this works if you're familiar with how Plex works you know that if you're streaming inside your network to your roku's Apple TVs or other players it'll try to stream the original content without any transcoding at all and this this works fantastic you can have a large number of streams going simultaneously that process takes place without any use of the hardware acceleration that is in your CPU however to stream to lower end devices or to mobile devices your CPU needs to transcode the movie from the original resolution real time and send it down to a lower resolution and lower bit rate to something that your mobile device can use and this is where the hardware acceleration shines to test this I set up an extreme case using three fully uncompressed Blu-ray movies with only a high definition multi-channel audio and force the playback to devices using 480p stereo at a low bit rate to force a heavy transcoding of all three streams as you can see each movie is being transcoded down to 480p stereo on a mobile device and this is absolutely amazing for a device this size as you can barely see it's working hard based on what I see here I'm sure it could easily handle twice this many streams and obviously if you have slightly lower resolution movies that you're transcoding it'll make it even easier then in contrast without Hardware acceleration I couldn't get even one of these high definition movies to transcode one session without question this device will do a fantastic job as a Plex server as long as you can get the Plex pass so it can handle the hardware acceleration if you follow the steps you should now be able to have a Plex server that you can literally mount on your TV or in a cabinet or anywhere you want that's capable of running multiple streams and drawing about 10 watts I'll have the other videos coming soon to further expand the use of the zema board and go well beyond Plex I plan on testing MB and jellyfin as well to see how well they work on this device that's about it for today's video and don't forget to subscribe and hit the like button if you found it useful thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mike Faucher

Views: 5,574

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Id: bQJV_l6cwPc

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023