Mastering Your Plex Media Server

so you want to start a plex server well in this video I'm not going to show you how to do that instead I'm going to get you on the right path to mastering your own new server and save you some of the headaches I had while I was trying to perfect mine you can throw a rock down the street to YouTube and hit 15 videos showing you how to install and set up a plex server plex even has their own video available on the website and I'll link in the description that will walk you through a step by step in my first video I explained some reasons why you might prefer place over XBMC so assuming that you are interested in plex and you either have or you can install it yourself in this part 2 video I'm going to go ahead and tell you some things that I figured out along the way when I was starting my own plex server keep in mind that these are largely based on my personal experiences and I know for a fact that someone somewhere will have a different preference opinion or way of doing things I have put a lot of time into testing and tweaking to find the best methods that work for me but it still doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have a better way of doing it remember this is your server so find what works best for you and stick with it ok so to start things off when you want to have your own plex server you have three main options one you can install it on your primary computer and will run in the background this is the most common setup for a average user and will usually work out just fine the downside of the setup is that if you use that computer for anything resource demanding you're on the risk of causing any active strings to stutter or buffer so if you go this route make sure you have a decent computer and make sure you pay attention to any active streams when you need those resources yourself for example if you like to encode video files for YouTube you may bring any other applications including Plex to a crawl while you're doing that the second route is an ass or network attached storage now for this example I don't mean a home built beefy system I'm talking about the basic store ones that are focused entirely on storage and reliability this option is usually explored by current Nass owners and quickly abandoned after they learn more about the transcoding requirements most of time these could work if you are using it on the same network and the clients are not requiring any kind of transcoding or just direct play but a standard Nass is not built for me and coding so if you go this route you run a higher risk of media streams constantly buffering or stuttering can kind of be annoying the third option and this is my favorite one a dedicated server this could sound intimidating I know but a dedicated server could be something as simple as an old PC built with spare parts tucked away in a closet somewhere for example I have an old Intel q95 5-0 that can usually give me three to four strings at once without any issues by any definition it's not a powerful machine but for my requirements it works out perfectly so in summary stay away from generic NASA installations and try to get ahead and dedicate a separate piece CD at you Canyon if not your main computer probably is going to be your best option now that you have your foundation figured out these next tips will help you along the way keep in mind that some of these may not be requirements that can definitely help improve your overall experience with Plex we talked a little bit about CPU needs let me expand on that just a little bit when you're planning your server try to imagine how many active streams you will need going at once remember a stream is any active video file requested by client so if one family member is watching a TV show in the room another one's on their tablet and you want to watch a movie in your living room you need to plan on being able to serve at least three streams at once Plex has come up with a nifty little way of calculating this for you there's a CPU benchmarking program called pass mark that rates CPUs and marks through some testing Plex has come up with the numbers that you can use to compare your needs to your abilities so for 1080p video file running around 10 megabits per second you'll need roughly 2000 marks and for a 720p or 4 megabit file you'll need around 1500 miles if we're going to follow this number we can assume a standard stream or 480p would probably take a row thousand marks if it was roaming at 1.5 million bits per second now that you understand that how do you use it well start off by going to wpbf.com I'll link it in the description click on benchmarks from the top menu and scroll down the page a little bit you're going to look for something called search for your CPU model click it now you'll see an area to type in your CP model and find the rating for it don't know your model well every system is a little bit different but for most Windows versions you can go to your desktop or Start menu and right click on my computer or my PC and you should see it listed there so let's go ahead and go back to my old server I have a cute 9 5 5 0 if you search for that you'll find it has a score of just over 4,000 marks this tells me that I can safely have at least 2 HD streams at one time or maybe I could get one HD stream and a couple standard ones for my needs however this is plenty figure out what your needs are and see if you have the right equipment and setup for it if not you might have to do a little bit shopping next up let's talk about media storage and I'll start off by saying any time you buy a new drive for your server always always always thoroughly tested before you rely on it do a Google search for a hard drive testing software and you'll find tools to do this for you losing terabytes of data just because you wanted to save a couple hours is dumb unless you're a more advanced user using things like raids or have backups try to make this a good habit also you will no need no way ever need the speed of an SSD to have to hold your media files cost per gigabyte makes us a terrible option on the flip side though stay away from green drives if you can green drives are really meant for mass storage and they're really low cost per gigabyte they're really slow I made this this movement I made this mistake once buying two green drives and quickly discover that when I try to move forward in a video it would take sometimes 10 20 seconds to start playing again I move those same files over to higher speed drive and all the seminoles back then mirroring step playbacks I again put those on a Western Digital red drive which are meant for naps and the time delay was down around 2 seconds so green drives will they work and are the most affordable means of storage but if you want a faster response time just keep this in mind when you're selecting your hard drives and on the topic of speed I want to ignore your SSD just yet after you get Plex installed and you can configure where your Plex me today is stored this includes things like cover art descriptions links to trailers and more if you have a secondary SSD in your system or you have a large enough primary SSD I strongly recommend you configure Plex to not only store its data on that drive but also to make sure you're transcoding directories on it as well if you have a large primary SSD and do a standard Plex installation it's already going to be set up like that so don't worry if not pointed to a second SSD it's going to really help you out why because when you're browsing through your media to find something watch how having a fast SSD capable of finding the data quickly will give you a smoother experience if not you can find yourself waiting a second or two your per page for the cover arts to load this may not seem like a lot of time but it can really add up and as for your trains go to folder well having them on an SSD just improves your medium load and seat times it will also really come in handy when you get up to four or more streams so how much do you really need well a Plex data folder can get pretty big I'm going to give you an example let's say you have 1500 movies in maybe 50 complete TV series on your hard drive your plex media data floor it could be anywhere between 13 to 15 gigabytes make sure you plan for this and as for the transcoder folder well you might want to plan for at least a couple gigabytes or if you've used it to any given time Ethernet heithir net is your friend Wi-Fi is your enemy don't get me wrong Wi-Fi has come a long way and technically would work in a pinch but trust me when I say this Wi-Fi can end up being the worst headache you will ever get at your plex media server it can cause stuttering buffering disconnects and can lead you on a wild goose chase try to find a problem on your computer I don't care if you have to run a cable across your floor and duct tape it down just do it and make sure it's at least one gigabit capable okay now you have your Hardware figured out and your storage setup the first thing you want to do is check your incoming port so build your server settings and click on connect from there you're going to see if your port is working if it's not you may need to set up some port forwarding to give off Network clients access to your media for more information just Googleplex port forwarding or see the description simply knowing that this is a problem will save you a lot of headaches in the future when you're trying to troubleshoot your issues alright we're almost done now all you need to do is add media but before you do make sure you understand how to and I don't mean how to click the edit library icon and add a folder I mean how do you make sure your media is ready well once you assign a folder that media have that your media is in Plex will scan that folder and build your library based off of the names and folders that you selected so if you have movies like The Fast and Furious and your file name is TFT MKV you'll be forced to manually search and correct this movie after Plex is done skiing now scaled it up to a thousand movies all with their proper names need to spend days correcting this issue I'll link the description showing you proper naming conventions for your media save yourself some time and do it right the first time last but in no way at least get a plex pass of course you're going to want to triplex out first but a monthly Plex pass can the subscription cost less than let's say a coffee at Starbucks every month and at the time of this video that's the only way to actually use your Plex on the Xbox or Playstation 4 aside from that you can access the cloud syncing trailers camera uploads and you can watch your media off-network on your tablet or your smartphone it's pretty convenient he should now be on your way to having a pretty good plex media server a lot of these things I had to learn the hard way so I really hope they help you out remember the Plex community online is a valuable resource to help you through any issues you may come across most people really are enthusiastic about their servers and they love helping others the only dumb question is the one that you don't ask thank you for watching this video if you liked it please click like and don't forget to subscribe assuming that you like plex you're interested and you either have or you can install yourself in this part 2 video I'm gonna going to them up but this doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have a better way of doing what I asked some

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 328,213

Rating: 4.7488842 out of 5

Keywords: Software (Industry), Media Server (Software Genre), Plex (Software)

Id: 5BZVmkzn5eQ

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 25 2014