NAS For Plex Media Server – 8 Mistakes People ALWAYS Make

if i could turn back time you started that like a complete you sung two songs in a single line you went if i could turn back i think you're the first man to properly confuse the youtube ai bot you took two songs to win splat [Music] hello and welcome back and it's me and eddie the web guy and once again we are talking about plex media server on a network attached storage plex on an ads it's like straightforward however despite the fact that we've been talking about this subject for more years and i care to remember it's worth highlighting that we do generally whether it's in the last comparison advice section subtle plug or it's just generally on the internet on reddit and forums and stuff like that people seem to make the same mistakes and a lot of the time people buy a network attached storage device for plex and they don't realize one that they bought poorly early doors or two that they don't realize they could be having a better experience so today me and eddie have put together the eight biggest mistakes that people seem to make when buying their first nas for flex media server some of this is nas some of it's plex some of it's both but these are the eight mistakes that we keep seeing time and time again eddie what's the first mistake the first mistake would be choosing a right cpu because um that's right when you're just uh got into a nas sort of industry now it's like our marketplace you might think like um all i need is like really good cpu because this is what you would do normally on your nuc pc because before you had nas you might have had um a computer which you turn into a plex but then you realize that your power supply and all these things and tickling and keeping it on and it's like it's just not worth it and also running out of space so you go in and out and then you think probably i need to match the same cpu uh what i had on the on a computer with nas which most of the cases is actually right it's true but the other thing is that most of the time on the desktop computers or laptops or whatever where you run your plex you will find a cpu which has graphics embedded so in that case you don't need to worry much about um that performance because this chip inside that cpu will take care of transcoding up to certain resolution obviously when you go to 4k then this chip is going to be simply too weak to to convert this uh video into something smaller in that case it borrows some performance from overall cpu performance and calculations so if you got something like i7 with graphics chip some anything up to 1080p the little graphics chip will take take care of it so the the performance of your nas is not going to be impacted so you can still use other apps and everything everything is going to go smooth but once you start transcoding 4k it's just going to take all the resources it can from this side i7 to transcode this 4k and it's going to work so the same the same things applies to nas as well because in some cases if he only needs uh 1080p video transcoding then um all you need is really some cheap seller on base nas which has this embedded graphics in there so it's gonna deal with the graphics and you're still gonna have fast enough nas to deal with other things like backups and whatever you wanted and that's thanks to that embedded processor and yeah time and time again we see people buying like xeon based nozzles again right here in the background it's slightly out of shot there's the ds1621xs plus xeon base nas really really good system it performed very well in nas but proportionally the percentage of cpu utilization was just insane compared with a bog standard celeron again once you reach 4k slightly different because then the gpu just freaks out by embedded gpu and then the cpu's raw power it then steps in anyway so the second mistake that we see a lot of people making when it comes to the first plex media server now it's the noise so many of you when you buy a network attached storage device now and i get it and now it's not everyone's had one before you stick it in the attic you stick it in the cupboard etc etc but too many of you have the nas in an area that you're going to be in regularly be it the same you know home cinema flicking through the movies or boom avengers or you are utilizing in a home office or one way or another you've bought a nas that primarily you're using for plex media server and it's in a location where you're going to be watching the media at the same time or just generally very close to it and the problem is nazis can make ambient noise the drives inside can make ambient noise and i don't know if you guys have ever enjoyed watching tv when there's noise going on it's not fun it's not fun and too many of you do not take into consideration the noise that nas makes when utilizing it for flex media server either chuck that somewhere real far away not the sky i'm talking the attic it covered something like that and basically make sure it's not in immediate your immediate range but secondly bear in mind about the noise these devices make the manufacturers make a very very good point of talking about ambient noise levels and hard drives once they hit that sacred atb marks you got one two four six eight tb after that hard drives are generally more enterprise in architecture and although you might think i want to buy my first network attached to a device or plex and i don't want to buy another one for the next five six years i'm gonna slam some 18 tb drives in there good for you they are going to make such a racket get them but make sure that nas is not in your local ambient environment if you don't believe me check out the videos from a couple of months ago where we did audio testing on just a single hard drive it was like a jar of nails falling down the stairs it was not a fun noise eddie over to you yeah exactly and if you want to connect uh through hdmi because lots of people might want to and you also want massive capacity then you may actually consider getting really cheap secondary nuts which you can keep away somewhere in in a cupboard and then the nuts which you connect through hdmi just stick one ssd in there it's quiet because that main multimedia nas can be then linked with your additional storage in a cupboard you know that that that that one can make noises so yeah so we can move on uh about the memory and the plex nas because um people usually think like how much memory do i need because with plex plex is very resource demanding up it's third party up is not like built in video station or ds video but you would find on qnap or synology plugs do need more ram so at least somewhere like one gigabyte i would go for two even gigabytes but also a lot of people buy nas with um this one gigabits are too good minimum requirement and then they end up actually realizing that there is not enough memory because they forgot about our system itself and other apps because it's not just plex there the other apps need as well uh memory if you especially if you run things like virtual machines or a web server or something like all of these things need run and also if you enable um a caching also need ram all these extra things need run but um if there is going to be only plex on the nas then um most of the time with two gigabytes there should be enough for system uh things to be run and and the plaques as well another thing is other people as well vis-a-ram actually they say they ask if i'm gonna add more ram like four gigabytes six gigabytes is my place gonna run faster and the question answer is really if you are running out of the memory yes it will improve the speed because when you run out the memory the system is borrowing the storage space from the hard drive which is so much slower than ram so in those cases you need more ram but if you never hit the maximum of your ram you're going to add more ram it's not going to change anything i mean again the only thing i would add to that is when in doubt 4 gig minimum there's a reason a lot of these quad-core celeron systems and particularly media systems have four gig minimum just go with that generally because the system and the live caching absolutely reason number four i'll say reason number four the fourth mistake we see lots of people making when purchasing the nars with net media server comes down to hevc highly efficient video codec or compression depending on where you read the an acronym otherwise known as h.265 it's been around for a number of years now four five years and it is by far the more efficient compression technique of multimedia so why am i bringing it up what's the mistake nice and simple it's predecessor hr264 been around for a while although not as compressed has to be said plays pretty much on everything whereas h.265 uh hevc and generally in more modern times found in timber hdr the result um with them on a lot of modern systems is they won't be played have you ever tried to play a modern file on a windows pc and whatever window calls um its video player these days goes no i'm not having it we need something more for this you need a codec that's because h.265 has a more complex royalty structure h.264 i should say only has the one patent pool so that is a bunch of brands that have you know worked together to produce in r d this and it's so straightforward it's unreal uh h.265 has a as three patent pools and the royalty structure behind it is so much more complex the result is that everything from windows to apple to google to the nas brands haven't got the licensing haven't got the codec utilization permission and the result is because it does cost money to do that the result is that if you try to play h.265 natively on and as it will automatically uh transcode it will automatically have to change that file it's not doing it because that file's too complex or doing it because of inconsistencies it's doing it because it's forced to do so the same file in h264 an h265 10-bit or not the latter requires changing it doesn't require much but it has a tremendous impact on the system watch a lot of my videos where i transcoded a lot of those jellyfish files and even though the size of 264 and 265 files of the same caliber and scale the result was the 265 had to be transcoded and the result was system resource utilization shot right up so find out what your library is find out what those files are because chances are you might be getting a nas that in theory can play back all of those files but however when you play it you hit a wall instantaneously there are ways around it qnap for example have um cyan or cayenne player which allows you to add codec support for h.265 on your nas thereby getting around this but that is an additional monthly fee it's a payment structure which a number of you were thinking no no no no i've just bought a nas i'm not having that over to you eddie yeah exactly so you need to first figure out is your tv compatible with this new way of compressing these video files which is 265 and um if your tv doesn't support you might be need to consider um uh usb not hdmi dongle like from amazon or android and that therefore you would have this compatibility with these kind of codecs or other way obviously is connecting your nas to your tv directly through hdmi so you don't need to convert things you just play directly the original file um we can move on on yeah on about the plex pass as well uh lots of people think like do i actually need it or if i get it is it worth it and um most of the time you might not need it uh if you just want simply uh play your videos if you want uh other extras like um access to a hardware transcoding chip then then um plex have made this as a demand a requirement premium so they could sell their passes so if you want to take advantage of this um transcoding chip uh then then you need to pay for this pass but the dashboard as well yeah also dashboard they will be not giving you full access like to see is how much cpu resources are taking for the transcoding and uh and things like that in in normal case if you don't have many users really you wouldn't care about these things but um but otherwise you do a lot of the stuff in plex media server behind the plex pass it's so ambiguous um because a lot of people when they use flex plus has been free for most of the time they use it's like the people that don't pay for winrar the people that don't pay for vlc or donate i'm one of them so a lot of people when they do use flex media server they've already feeling the gall the gall of having to buy a network attached storage device and the idea that they've had to spend a few hundred nicker or a thousand in some cases and then be told some of the features they expected to have are not available there is an inconsistency between plex clients and plex media server for nas compared with just using the plex client and all too often you're not aware that some of the features are just not going to be available there's lots of streaming type stuff on there that most people let's be honest largely ignore but a lot of the resource gathering a lot of the scraping of the metadata some of the sources some of the routines and definitely as eddie mentioned there there um there a lot of the back in cpu bandwidth utilization network utilization that analytical information is presented in a very plex specific way that you can't have without the plex pass which can annoy some people and ultimately lead a lot of people to be quite disappointed with uh plex media server nas but number six while i'm rabbiting that you are not laying there to get a word in edgeways this one is something that ed's actually alluded to a couple of times there and this is to do with hdmi out on a nas because as eddie rightly pointed out there a lot of people when they get announced they're thinking about the 4k version of the final cut of avatar where you can actually count the pixels um but it's just madness these um they want to take advantage of a plex nas with an hdmi output bung it into the big old tv your own lead or something and really enjoy that media with latency that's close to zero however what a lot of people aren't aware of is that in 2021 the state of hdmi out on a nas with plex is nowhere near as good as it used to be plex is no longer available for as an hdmi tool officially on a number of nas brands out there and you have to go for third party tools um and there's kind of home brewery type versions which are updated um but a lot of nas brands with hdmi out no longer have a plex media server app immediately available this isn't their fault this is plex who have just thought no we're not going to chuckle out of r d and a bit of budget into an hdmi gui um and therefore as these nazis have moved into newer versions of their software qnap example moving into hd station um version 4 a lot of those apps where they needed the third-party developer to kind of get on board and the third party developer went yeah we ain't got no money for that they didn't develop an hdmi alternative so the result was that right now if you do buy an ass and a qnap or an asa store with an hdmi out and you're hoping to enjoy plex you are not going to be utilizing proper cert um plex endorsed tools nor are you going to be utilizing qnap or asus or verified tools you're going to be using slightly home brew kind of re-jigged ones which again i know a number of you are going to look at that interface and go well i'm not enjoying this at all so do bear that in mind if you are buying a plex nas for hdmi out double check the apps you're going to be utilizing because there's a good chance you are going to come away disappointed yeah and let's move to the next point about transcoding and do i really need it because lots of people think that transcoding equals streaming that's the same word but it's not transcoding what it means is video conversion on the fly so as as the file is being pulled from the nas it sees the destination device will not be able to play this file so in the middle you need to change the format of the video so that this nation device can actually play it that's what transcoding is but if you have up-to-date tv or or a phone very likely that you can stream original file on your destination device the reason why you wouldn't be able to do that is that your tv is really old or if you stream on your phone locally for example that your your um network is so busy that you need to actually squeeze the file smaller just resize it so so that there's enough boundaries in network to stream especially that applies for remote streaming when you're streaming through 3g and like 1080p or 4k there is not enough bandwidth to actually play original file yes the internet is getting faster so there's 100 200 megabit internet available so soon the transcoding will be less and less um needed because you will be able to stream original files but um but that's the best thing you need to keep in mind transcoding doesn't mean streaming so if you have if you're in at home you've got the compatible tvs compatible devices you've got fast enough internet uh i mean ethernet or wi-fi especially if you moved on to wi-fi six already very likely that you won't need the transcoding only really for remote transcoding or old devices i think a lot of people when they go into buying a nasa flex media server they're going with a certain budget in their head again we've talked about this before 500 1000 2 000 etc and where that money goes be it on the storage the nas or whatever or the memory as we've discussed a lot of people supersize the nozzles to go for something high-end that then they know that they're never going to watch this media outside the house they're only going to be two three tvs in the house you know there's a home console over there they aren't they're relying on a network a 100 megabyte per second network which is if you've got devices as you rightly point out that can claim these files is more than sufficient and the money that you may have binned on a nas that was heavily gpu embedded you're never going to use that and therefore that money could go into storage you could go into another tiers of backup it could go into so many other things and all too often we're seeing people buying some pentium i3 i5 solution for a setup where they could have got away with a sileron or even in some cases that new ryzen that has no gpu embed embedded gpu on the cpu but nevertheless outperforms on the local area network versus a number of higher end cpus just within that context so just know whether you're actually going to need to reformat those files so our last point and this is such a minor one it's a very very small point that a lot of people overlook and most people find out about this during the setup and even when they don't find out about this when they find out about it later on they are up till 2 3 a.m they're furious they don't know what the problem is and when they find out they're they're just live it and that is that in a lot of senses plex media server is always online lots of people don't seem to realize that as much as i talk about network attached storage device and getting away from the cloud and stuff like that plex media server needs to bounce occasionally just ping the main plex server you can't if you try to set up a nas using just the network all too often you find out that you can't see the nas the nas still needs to have even unlimited internet accessibility and with that ping the flex media server if you don't have it sometimes the flex media server won't appear or it can fluctuate on your network and not appear on your client devices and it's not something you can really pin down it's not a consistent thread it it's not a case of if you disconnect the flex media server from the internet but keep it on the network it'll stop working immediately but if that app isn't able to just ping flex in some way periodically and i can't even tell you what's in that then you can hit um client and nas communication problems have you noticed that beforehand yeah there's not just um paintings also you need to remember that all subtitles are not even suppliers that are icons and all these thumbnails all of this need to be synchronized all the time to the servers and um and that's true it's always pinging back as well because you may not have just one device you might have several servers or several destination devices where you need to stream so this is how they keep all this um environment working so they can communicate to each other but yeah so this has been the eight things a lot of people ever get wrong or don't know about plex media server and network attached storage i hope you found this video it's overrun i think about five minutes longer than i would have liked but we just wanted to make sure we covered all the bases i'm sorry if you knew some of them and you waited till the end for some massive revelation that wasn't there i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope some of you found this very very helpful if you think there's tips that we've missed or certain elements about uh owning a nas reflex media server that we didn't cover maybe there's another videos worth in this maybe there's things that we've not covered that we just didn't know because we'd can't see the wood for the trees but apart from that thank you so much for watching if you have enjoyed the video click like if you do want to learn more click subscribe and if you are interested in finding the right solution for you then do contact me and eddie in the free advice section of nas computers it's a link in the description it's completely free it's unbiased it's only managed by me and that guy there we just want to help people get the right solution again tell us what you need tell where your expectations are we can make a few recommendations and then after that the ball is in your court thank you so much for watching eddie i will see you later cheerio see ya the rest of you see you in the next video

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 60,687

Keywords: 1080P PLEX, 4K PLEX, 4K PLEX NAS, 4K SYNOLOGY PLEX NAS, HDMI NAS PLEX, PLEX, PLEX ACCELERATED GRAPHICS CPU, PLEX CPU EMBEDDED GRAPHICS, PLEX FIX, PLEX GUIDE, PLEX HDMI NAS, PLEX ISSUE, PLEX MEDIA SERVER SYNOLOGY, PLEX NAS, PLEX NAS DRIVE, PLEX NAS ENCODING, PLEX NAS HEVC, PLEX NAS ISSUE, PLEX NAS RAM, PLEX NAS SERVER, PLEX PASS TRANSCODING, PLEX PLAYBACK FIX, PLEX PROBLEM, PLEX SERVER, PLEX SERVER MEMORY, SYNOLOGY NAS PLEX, SYNOLOGY PLEX NAS, SYNOLOGY PLEX NAS DRIVE

Id: hxYHICTZ2a4

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021