Plex on Unraid: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

in today's video I'm going to show you how to use Plex the ultimate media server software that lets you access your movies TV shows music pictures and more from anywhere whether you want to watch your favorite shows on your big screen TV listen to your playlists on your phone or share your photos with your friends Plex has you covered plus Plex also offers thousands of free streaming titles so you'll never run out of things to watch sounds awesome right well stick around because I'm going to show you how to set up Plex how to add your media and how to customize your Plex experience trust me you don't want to miss this one all right let's get into it all right we're back at the unraid desktop to get started go ahead and jump over to apps in the search box type in Plex and you'll find here that there's a couple different options to choose from I'm a big fan of binex containers so we're going to focus on those you'll see here you've got Plex and then Plex pass the Plex pass is the premium account let me show you what that has to offer I won't cover everything here but I'll go over some of the highlights for people that really like Television TV shows one of the nice things here is you can skip the intros or skip the out credits which doesn't seem like a whole big deal but it's kind of nice to not have to sit there and watch all that extra stuff passer protection that's basically just a sleep feature rewind on resume this is really nice too if you uh pause to get up to go to the bathroom or something get a snack come back instead of having to manually rewind a little bit you can set it to rewind at whatever interval that you set up gives you DVR access so that you can record stuff off your local broadcast and if you have recorded stuff from the DVR it allows you to skip commercials the last nice thing here is that allows you to download the shows to an offline device you know such as a cell phone or something like that if you're going to be out of internet access for movie lovers allows you to skip the credits you know some of these movies nowadays the end credits can be pretty long so it's nice to be able to skip that once again the rewind on resume feature which is fantastic allows you to have multiple additions so if you have like let's say director's cut or extended release version then you can have multiple additions in the same Library gives you download access and then lots of extras and trailers and if you're into music it's got some stuff for you too which is not only a media player plexamp offers a variety of different features allowing you to mix up your media play sonically related tracks and a bunch of other features and once again it gives you the power to download the stuff to your offline devices and what does this cost cuz there's always a cost right as they say just $4.99 a month orever but if you scroll down to the very bottom here there's a monthly subscription there's annual subscription or a lifetime and monthly cost at $4.99 isn't too bad if you just want to test it out but you know if you do the math on that that's $60 a year so you might as well just go to the annual but then again if you're going to go the annual you might as well just get the lifetime because it's you know three years worth and trust me you'll use Plex for more than 3 years you can start with a free version and always upgrade later they do have sales every now and then so if you just keep an eye on it I'm sure you'll find a discount I believe I got mine for around $80 we'll be setting up the free version verion this time just so you can see how it works all right so back to your UNR we're going to do the bhex Plex so click install and then for host path 2 here this is your media location so you want to select that and in a previous video we' set up a media folder click on media and click off there that's the main thing you need to worry about so go ahead and scroll to the bottom and hit apply all right go ahead and it done now go back to your Docker Tab and then in there you'll see the bhex Plex container it should be started and running once you go over to the auto start turn that on and then click on the bhx Plex icon go to web UI and we'll start setting it up all right at this point go ahead and sign in with the account that you created and if you haven't signed up it allows you to create an account on the Fly since this is a new demo test account I'm going to just go ahead and put in an email I created earlier all right once signed in hit got it I was trying to S the Plex pass features so just go ahead and close out of that and then you can name your server whatever you'd like in this case I'm just going to leave it on demo there's an option here to allow you to access the media outside of your house which is kind of nice if you're going out and about want to access stuff on your phone or you know at a friend's house I've used it a lot at hotel rooms long as you have internet it seems to work all right now we have to add our library so click add Library we'll do movies first select movies then hit next and you'll browse for a media folder so as you can see here I don't have one listed yet so we'll go back here we'll H cancel here go back to our Network shares in this case it's going to be back SLB slash and then the IP address of your server and then slash media in here you need to create a new folder I'm going to call this one movies we'll create another one for TV shows and then I've already got one in here for music and one for photos so we'll just leave it like that go back to Plex here now we want to browse for media folder go to your media folder and then select movies and then hit add then hit add Library we can hit add Library again and add a TV show browse for media folder again it's under media and then TV and then add add Library we'll add another one for music and then another one for photos music next browse music add that one and then add one more add Library photos photos sounds good browse for media folder media and photos and add add Library once you've got your library selected go ahead and hit next and just so you know you can do multiple libraries if you've got several different movie categories like let's say you've got movies you've got documentaries 3D movies or something of that sort you can add multiple libraries just go back hit add Library hit movies again change the name like 3D movies hit next browse for media and then you just select whatever folder that is I don't have any right now so I'm not going to about that once you're done with your selection hit next and then hit done these pin sources here it shows you items that are going to appear on your library so you can have watch lists movies the TV shows music photos and then it has live TV options which I don't have a TV tuner so I'll remove that one movies and shows that's free stuff so once you have your items selected go ahead and hit finish setup that's the basics for getting Plex installed it's pretty quick and easy so on the home screen here it shows you recently added media so we've got recently added music recently added photos and then these are Plex picks things that they think that I would like to watch binge worthy shows these are all free streaming on the Le hand side you got a watch list you can create a watch list and then have those items added here on your movies it says it's empty and that's right because there's nothing in there yet same with TV shows since they brand new directories there's nothing in there so let's go back let's go back to our shared folder on the server you'll notice there's just a few random files here I got some public domain media and copied those on here just so I'd have something to test with it's wonderful life from 1946 would be a movie so we'll drag that into the movies folder Night of the Living Dead from 1968 once again movie hit okay Beverly Hillbillies that would be a TV show from back in the day and Abbott and Costello Africa screams 1949 looks like like drag that in there all right go back to our server here and just refresh the page here and it's popping up with the select your favorite streaming services which is something I forgot to mention you can tie in your different streaming services that you have like if you've got an account let's say with you know Amazon here you can sign in with Amazon Prime or Amazon video and you can have that Library add it onto your Plex Media Library so go through here select what you use then you can hit save changes and you can have it start syncing all right so since we've added media to the folders now let's go ahead and have Plex reanalyze if you click on the little wrench in the top right corner it opens settings scroll down to where it says libraries manage libraries click on libraries then click on scan Library files it'll go through and analyze the different libraries that you've added there you go it's all set so go back to your home in the top left now go to your movies and you'll see that the movies appear there under TV shows same thing and it defaults to the recommended library but you can also just click on the library file itself one of the things I really love about plex is that it pulls in the media image Art and the descriptions for all the titles so if we go in there it'll show you the cover art for the show gives you a brief synopsis of what it's about then if you go into the season it'll show you the cast in the crew members directors producers that kind of information and then it shows you all the episodes that you have once again it shows you the title of that episode and if you go into one of these it shows you a brief description of that episode and if you hit play or you just click on the box there it should start playing automatically just like that to back out of it you click on the stop button you go back to your home movies works the same way you can go into the movie itself shows you the cover art brief description of It cast and crew reviews and let's say you've got a large library and you want to add this to your watch list if you go into the item you can click on this little bookmark icon here and it'll add it to the watch list you can also Mark it as watched if you've previously watched this and you just want to update your library you just click that and it'll be watched if you click it again it'll mark it as unwatched you can edit here and in the more option you'll have access to a bunch of other handy utilities if we go back to our movie list here you notice that this first one here the Abbott and Costello Africa screams one is just pulled an random image out of the film rather than cover it and there's no description if we go back to our root folder here where the movies are stored you'll notice that these here it's a wonderful life is in its own folder and it's named properly sulex is able to distinguish what movie it is this one however is not named in its proper format so we'll clean this up the name of the tit or the title of the movie is Africa screams and then the year is correct and Plex prefers that it's in its own folder so we will copy this create a new folder we'll paste that name on there then we'll put the file inside of that now if we go back to Plex go back to the settings libraries and have it scan the library files again it should fix that so we'll go back up to our home movies and there you go proper image Art and the description and all the casting characters now if you've already got a large Library going back and fixing all that stuff seems like a big pain and it is but there are other programs that handle that for you such as radar and sonar and we'll talk about those in an upcoming video they take out a lot of the heavy lifting automating a lot of that stuff for you so we'll go back to home here let's get down to TV shows I forgot to mention there's also a rating option here too one of the nice features with Plex if you watch a show you watch the complete episode and I'll just skip through this here let that finish [Music] up and it wants to start playing the next one right away you can turn that off there or you can just hit the stop button to stop it now you'll see in the top Corner it'll have a little green check mark indicating that that episode has been watched all right so if we go back to home now there'll be a new option in the top Corner that says continue watching that allows you to pick up from where you left off in this case it's on season one of episode 2 so if we go down under music now the music library acts the same way however the uh artist that I downloaded was Chan just because it's free and in the public domain but it's not a known album so it doesn't know how to pull in the the proper information for it but it is still allows it to be played but the same rules apply if you name it properly and it's in there Plex will Discover it properly and have all the artist information and the track names listed under photos it just Imports the photos that you have in there and since I just have a bunch of Raw photos of my you know cat and dog in here is just displaying those but you can separate things by folders and uh our dog Apollo here was bad he didn't get anything this Christmas next down we got movies and shows that are on Plex you can just pick something and hit play and it plays once you've got got Plex setup it's pretty straightforward and easy to use using Plex and a web browser allows you to access your media pretty much anywhere which you can also use dedicated devices to view your Plex Library so on plex's website here they've got a list of some of their devices that they work with you can use it in your browsers such as Chrome Edge Firefox and Safari pretty much any browser though really mobile apps for Android and iOS for tablets once again Android and the iPad OS desktops laptops Macs Windows Linux pretty much everything some smart TVs have the Plex app built into them you can get streaming devices such as Amazon Alexa Amazon Fire TV Android TV Apple TV chomecast portals from Facebook Roku Sonos and even gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox I personally use chomecast with Google TV built into it and I'll leave a link in the description if you're interested in picking up one of those I reviewed a few of them in the past and by far the Chrome I think is the easiest to use there's not really any commercials or any kind of ads that pop up in the middle of everything it's just a pleasant experience however I'm curious what do you use leave a comment below and let me know so there you have it plexus installed set up and running it's pretty easy to use but before you go if you found this video helpful make sure to hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: AlienTech42

Views: 3,570

Keywords: Unraid, plex, setup, plex install, plex setup, cord cutting, media, movies, tv, photo, picture, music, streaming, docker, tutorial, guide

Id: mVyYU5TaV_A

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024