Plex Server - What you need to know about hardware

hello everybody this is my crochet today we're going to talk about Plex so today I'd like to talk about Plex it's been something I've been using for many many years I had the pleasure of interviewing one of their key developers many years ago and I've loved the product ever since so I kind of want to go over the full aspect of the product talk a little bit about the software talk a little bit about the hardware and some of the things to look out for tips and tricks and kind of go through a basic setup from start to finish so let's get into it a little bit so the first thing I'd like to talk about is how to get set up and then we'll discuss a little bit about the hardware and you know what recommendations and what works and what doesn't work the concept behind Plex is is kind of simple but if you haven't used it before it may seem foreign to you so the premise of Plex is that there is a server piece of software sitting somewhere whether it's sitting on your Nass or whether it's sitting on your desktop PC or whether you've repurposed an old piece of hardware and using it as a server and the basic premise for Plex is to take your media files from somewhere and basically display them to the application of choice in other words I want to be able to serve them up to my Roku my Apple TV my Nvidia shield my desktop PC my mobile app my mobile devices whether it's an iPad iPhone Android whatever it is so I want to be able to play my media everywhere and so today we're going to go through the setup and I'm going to show you where things get a little tough and basically how to solve them or hopefully how to identify them and figure out how you want to solve them so let's start from the beginning let's start from actually installing Plex so as you can see here I went to the Plex site and I'll leave it all all the links in the show notes to everywhere that I go today so the first thing that we're gonna want to do is we're gonna need to download the Plex software so now before we do that let me just caveat a couple things if you're running an ass and it's powerful enough like one of the you know medium to higher a higher-end qnap source analogies they will have an app in the App Store for the plex server and I would recommend you get it directly from there if you're going to put this on your desktop laptop or a repurposed PC somewhere in the corner then this is what you're going to want to do so I'm going to go ahead and download since I've already downloaded it I'm going to go straight over to my files and we're going to go ahead and install it so again this is pretty straightforward and you'll see when we set it up there's really not that much to do to set up a server the key thing is where am I putting it so you have to really pick out a location such as a your desktop or a laptop or you know a standalone PC don't confuse the server with what you're playing back those are two separate things the server is going to bring the files to what you're using to play back in some cases that can be the same device so we're gonna go ahead and hit install and it's a pretty quick straightforward install just take you a few minutes here I skipped ahead a little bit see you and watch the progress bar so now go ahead and launch the server and if we look right here into the bottom task tray you'll see the plex media server running so I'm gonna go ahead and double click on that and it's gonna launch me into an interface page I'm gonna go ahead and log in the very first thing you're gonna want to do is to set up a library down the wizard walks you through it since this is already set up on this system it kind of skipped that part but it's really simple you're basically picking out the location of your media and actually let's go through and set one up from scratch so you kind of get a better understanding so here you'll see your section of libraries I'm going to go ahead and hit plus and I'm going to pick the type of you know whether it's other videos or whether it's movies I'm going to pick other videos and I'm gonna give it a name I'm gonna say camera videos and this is where I'm gonna pick the location of some sample 4k videos that I've taken right off with my camera so let's go ahead and do that and here it says browse for media so this is where it's going to it's going to want me to pick a location now there's a couple of weird little things about plex and how it finds files that you probably need to be aware of here if you notice there's only a C Drive listed here now if I had additional hard drives it would obviously list that list those if I had a USB Drive it would list those or if I mapped a network drive it would list that I have not done any of those so what I'm going to do is actually navigate over to using the File Explorer navigate over to where my movies are located that I want to input and then I'm going to copy this path here so I'm just going to highlight clipboard and then when they get over back over to here I'm actually going to paste this in so that I have the entire path listed for where the videos are located I'm going to go ahead and click add add library and the movies will slowly pop up and migrate into my folder now obviously since these are not you know downloaded movies or mp4s there's not a whole lot of great metadata with these so you'll have to kind of create your own if you want to even bother or you can just use them SS and you notice that the library is actually scanning for metadata and it's to try and pick something so that you can kind of see what it is now these are largely all the same which is why the the images are being picked up very similar but it tries to grab the first few frames of the video basically what I've done here is pre setup the server so and I can add as many libraries as I want so if you've got multiples like you had downloaded files home movies movies that you've created yourself you know through by dripping or however you got your content you can create them in separate folders and you can add them to different libraries okay before we get into the next section I want to go over some of the settings that may help you get the best performance and the most you functionality out of your system so let's just kind of go over some of the settings real quick so we click on settings and there's not much in the general tab so we'll skip over that one the first one I want to cover is actually remote access now this is one that obviously you will need to set up if you want to access your media through you know the iPhone or Android app outside of your house because you'll need to be able to forward that that content over so here's you can enable the remote access when you enable the remote access it will try to use you know a universal plug and play in your router which hopefully you have disabled that being said what you'll want to do and you'll need to do that specifically based on your own individual router is do what's called a port forwarding so that the content can be the client apps your iOS and Android can actually find the server when you when you want to connect up so if you're not familiar with port forwarding on your own particular router you'll probably need to do a quick search and figure out how to do that so you basically enable remote access you'll need this port number which is 32 400 to actually set it up in your port forwarding rule and then additional settings here if you want to cap an internet upload so in other words if you want to limit Plex from going beyond a sir right you can set that right now or otherwise we'll use everything available the other things that might be of interest to you are the transcoder section there is some options that you can set here and the real critical one is right here where it says use hardware acceleration when available that is not on by default so you will need to turn that on if you want to attempt to use Hardware accelerate your server so it can decode or trance code I should say much more efficiently and again at CPU dependence so you may or may not be able to actually see any difference and that's basically the ones that you're gonna want to pay attention to the rest are probably you can just leave as default and it should work fine before we get into actually playing back and setting up your client pcs I want to talk a little bit about what happens with this medium ok so what I've drawn here is a little bit of kind of a sketch of how things work so and I think it's critical to understand what happens with Plex so that when you do set up the client it you'll get the results you want and I'm gonna demonstrate you know where the CPU or the power and where the transcoding and all that comes comes into play a little bit later when we actually start testing the clients so but I first want to go over the basic concept so as we talked about this is the Plex server that's residing on a computer someplace whether it's an extra laptop or whether it's a you know dedicated server or nass Union whatever it may be there are differences how there's differences in how Plex reacts when you play content and what you're playing content from and let me try to explain that a little bit more in simplistic terms here I've Illustrated two different use cases one is coming from Plex server serving media - like a Roku firestick Apple TV and one is a plex server serving content to a mobile client or like iOS or Android if I have for example 4k movies on my plex server many of the Roku and Apple TV devices and fire stick devices can play that 4k content natively directly so they don't need to modify the film in any way they can just take that content directly from the server and just play it so what happens when you hat when that takes place is there is no transcoding transcoding is the process of taking say a 4k video and reprocessing it down to 1080p or 720p so that your your client can actually show it when you do that it takes a lot of CPU power so when you are streaming from a Plex server to say an Apple TV or Nvidia shield or Roku one of the newer Roku's those will play the 4k content natively so for example if I play a movie from my Apple TV there will be no transcoding it'll just pull the file from the server and play it and the result of that is that there's very little CPU being used because the plex server is really acting as a file server so it's not modifying the video in any way it's just giving it to the client in contrast if I take and play this on a mobile device it the mobile device easy they're gonna come in wirelessly or it's going to be one of these where I can't display a 4k video on mobile device because it won't support it so the file has to be modified and transcoded down to a different resolution before the mobile client can take place so what's what Plex does is it actually transcodes a 4k video for example down to 1080 or 720 p as its streaming it to the client so the result is is that your plex server is having to work hard to convert that movie so that your client can can can actually view it and without a lot of buffering and stuff and everything else that's kind of the difference if you're on wired connection within your home and you've got devices that will support Plex natively or the 4k movies natively then Plex will have to do very little work once you step outside the house or once you're streaming to a mobile device in or outside the house then the dynamic dynamics changed a little bit and then you've got a situation where you have to have enough CPU power to be able to encode those films and we'll talk a little bit more about CPUs and GPUs and and things like that as we go along the last thing I want to mention is that yes and we sort of touched on it a little bit earlier when we did the install is that Plex is doesn't care where your files are so the Plex server and the storage can be in one device or let's say you have an older Nass or an ass that doesn't have an Intel processor so it can't really in code video very well you can use your nasty as a file location so Plex will pull your files from your nas or storage or USB or whatever it is that you're attaching to and accomplish the same thing so this allows you to flexibility to put your plex server on a smaller system tucked out of the way somewhere and then basically take advantage of the Nass unit that you already own so which is kind of how I do it I have multiple NASA's here and basically my plex server pulls from various locations depending on the content type so I hope that helps you understand the kind of a framework so from there let's get into a little bit more specifics before we get into the actual demonstration and of the CPU and the resources it takes and the difference between direct play which is the ability to take the file directly from the location to your client without transcoding and the and transcoding itself so that it goes to a mobile device or something with lower power or lower resolution I want to talk a little bit about where to get some additional information from and I'll put these links in notes so that you can get to a museum of so let's talk a little bit about some referenced information that's located on the Plex site they have a there's a page called what kind of CPU do I need for my server and it gets into a lot of details I'm not going to go through it all but it it kind of gives you some worthwhile information make some recommendations on CPUs as far as how much power you need and then it kind of gives you some guidelines so if you've got a CPU you can head over to CPU bench mark dotnet and look up your CPU and see if it falls into this category depending on the movie type you're going to get now there's one couple of twists that I want to get into is that these are guidelines so you know your mileage may vary you might need a little more a little less the one thing that will make a big difference is if let me scroll down here to this link where it says using hardware accelerated streaming if you have one of the Intel CPUs that supports hardware like a hardware encoding or if you happen to have a GPU and you're in the system that you're using as your Plex server you can enable a function called hardware acceleration and that makes a huge difference in in how many streams you can support and as well as whether or not you can use possibly a lower end CPU a hardware acceleration in my case because I what we're going to demo the Plex server in the playback on is a basically of a virtual machine which has been set up off a Core i5 and I've allocated four cores to it at 75% so it's basically mirrors at lower end i5 and what you'll find is that it that's more than enough to support most of whatever you want to what I do but if you have the opportunity to have a hardware accelerated chip it'll allow you to to not max out your CPU as point of reference and I've tested mine with about five transcoding streams at the same time when I ain't why when I enabled the hardware acceleration I was able to basically drop my CPU usage less than half so it makes a huge difference if you have a GPU or a chip that supports quick sync for that on-the-fly type decoding and again there's a great reference here so if we go to this particular page it talks more about what it can do for you and how much extra benefits you can get from using a hardware acceleration so it's really boils down to you know what you presently have is hardware or what you plan on getting most people use repurpose an old CPU tower or laptop and use that as a server so it's it's helpful to know what you have and look it up and see what limitations are going to be so that you don't have any unreasonable expectations and again I want to remind you that when you're playing this internally on a wired network you won't need it you know like if you've got the proper clients such as a you know a late version Roku or Apple TV you're not going to need to do any transcoding at all so the CPU type will make very little difference it's only when you actually start to transcode movies that it becomes an issue so I hope that sort of makes sense in terms of where the CPU plays and where the performance of your server makes a critical difference in playing the format the lower the resolution movies that you have the less this becomes an issue if you shoot in 4k off of your camera or off if you're getting 4k videos that you're downloading somewhere you know those are going to need a little bit more power to play ok so let's move on to actually running this thing testing it and see what it looks like ok so now we're going to test out direct play so there should be no transcoding whatsoever in this video and you can see exactly how it out of the Nvidia shield so let's go ahead and play this video keep your eyes on the CPU usage and you'll see significant difference in CPU usage between transcoding and direct play so here we go nice smooth playback so we're playing that content a movie it's a 4k again it's a 4k video it's off of my camera playing it the same way that we were playing it before and as you can see the CPU usage is just skyrocketing it's not anywhere near what it was with direct play so there you can see the correlation between what happens to the same video or the same content when it's done through direct play versus transcoding and this is where the transcoding just gobbles up your CPU so anything and everything that you have will get used up and this is where the buffering occurs this is where stuttering occurs when your CPU just can't keep up so you'll need to be aware of that's what's happening when at all possible you obviously want to do direct play you know inside your house but there are situations you know going through Wi-Fi going to a portable device where transcoding is going to be an issue so the more horsepower you can throw at it the easier and smoother that becomes I hope that gives you a better idea of Plex and kind of the fundamentals out of better select Hardware how to make use of the hardware that you have there are so many variables and that we didn't even get into such as you know video bit rates and such like that and that may impact CPU performance and you know other factors and it's always best to have a little bit more CPU power then then you think you need but hopefully this helps you understand when something happens where it's coming from the other factor we didn't get really too much into is networking and that's you know obviously that can have a big impact on performance so if you're streaming over Wi-Fi you're not going to get the same performance most likely going to force it into transcoding and or it's going to stutter and not work the way that you want so it's always best to do hardwire and unless you've got the CPU power to transcode you know to every device on your network if you put a you know if you are repurposing something like a core i7 you probably aren't going to have any problems one way or the other even the you know the higher-end i5s will do the job for you so you just kind of have to judge what you have and understand when something doesn't quite work the way that you expect these are the areas that you're going to look at so I hope you enjoyed the video please feel free to post any questions or comments if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe to the channel and turn on to notifications and we'll see on the next video

Channel: Mike Faucher

Views: 1,372

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Plex, Plex Server, NAS, Plex Media, Plex Hardware

Id: OoWF00FmZQQ

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2019