Using Plex Media Server to create "NickFlix"

since i was a kid i have been a massive fan of movies over the decades i have accumulated thousands of films tv shows and cartoons and more across vhs dvd and blu-ray media types when dating all the way back to the late 2000s i was ripping my own media and loading it into windows media center with what was known as an htpc or a home theater pc but man it was a chore to keep up with all the metadata manual not to mention that this was all dependent on a homemade freenas rig with 12 drives that turned itself into a vacuum cleaner and a radiator in the living room and in southern california that's not exactly ideal and even when i made the switch to the apple ecosystem over 10 years ago i thought apple and itunes would be the answer with the advent and launch of the new tiny apple tv replacing the entire home theater pc well i even made a video about this setup almost 10 years ago using a synology with a mac mini but itunes is its own bear to manage likes to corrupt its database pretty often and that plan wasn't really sustainable long term and for a while there i relented to just giving up and using the various streaming services like netflix and hulu but it left a very bad taste in my mouth for several reasons one they never had all the movies and shows that i wanted to watch on a regular basis and two i still have this massive library of thousands and thousands of movies just sitting around it was at this moment a few short years ago that i met my new media lord and savior plex [Music] now before we settle into this video i wanted to give you a heads up that this is probably going to span multiple videos in the coming weeks and months because there is so much detail to cover when it comes to proper implementations and the underlying infrastructure required so today i wanted to go over plex the ends and the outs and my own personal journey with some lessons learned across the different implementations over the years and then in a future video we'll dive deeper into some of the nuts and bolts of how to really fine-tune your setup to your needs so make sure you're subscribed to the channel here because you don't want to miss all i'll be sure to put chapter markers on all of these as well just in case you're looking for something specific but you can always come jump in the orbital jigsaw discord if you have any questions we've got a few plex power users in there with us i'm sure a lot of you have heard of plex but have never really drilled down into the details so i wanted to pretend you've never heard of it before introduce you to it my way and walk you through the various configurations i've been through over the years up to where i'm at today building my own 4u rackmount transcoding monster server backed by a dedicated nas and 10 gigabit ethernet at its core plex is a wonderfully integrated media management platform it has links and ties to metadata directories like tvdb.org the movie database as well as imdb and this removes almost all of the burden from you getting the right metadata for each of your titles as it simply downloads the cover art updates titles and inserts complete cast and crew information for you it even has the ability to pull subtitles from an open source directory and download trailers from youtube but why is data center dude up here talking about plex and media management well in exchange for that easier metadata population it introduces a new requirement data management and storage but the two big things i wanted to talk to you about today with regards to plex are its native transcoding and the shared libraries these are arguably two of the things that make plaques as popular as it is sure the curation element of building your own internal streaming service is definitely part of the allure but what really makes that powerful is the transcoding engine built into the software see what you have to realize is that there are many many ways for you to consume content these days you could watch on connected smart tvs or in a myriad of fire sticks and apple tvs and rokus but there's also an entire industry of smartphones and devices to watch on as well the trick is that all of these have their own hardware and software and support for various codecs which is where plex really shines see their transcoding engine has the ability to convert any format to just about any other format so while you might have a 4k hdr h.265 encoded riff of your favorite movie not all devices can play that format or perhaps you don't have the bandwidth necessary over wifi to handle that kind of stream so plex will transcode or step down the quality automatically for you to a supported format to be able to play on whatever device you're viewing on whether that's iphones or rokus or even a web browser on your laptop it just handles it and as a viewer and a consumer this is absolutely magical but as a server operator this can be an absolute nightmare but wait hang on i'll come back to that secondly we need to talk about shared libraries see internally plex gives server admins the ability to selectively curate content into separate libraries within their media storage and then choose which libraries they want to share with other end users think of it in the context of parents with kids within the household you might have all your favorite schwarzenegger 80s action films but you don't want the kids watching those so you create a separate account on the server designate only the shared libraries that have kid-friendly content and this way you can keep them out of your r-rated classics and let's be honest you don't really want 127 episodes of paw patrol infecting your action movie library am i right with the right networking configuration you can also access your plex library remotely so when you're sitting at the airport for two hours you can just put your headphones in and watch a movie from your own library the possibilities and combinations here are endless is the point i'm trying to drive home with that out of the way let's go back to the part we left out on earlier because that is the crux of this whole video beyond the introduction and why data center dude is up here talking to you about tv and movies hardware configuration for the media server is where it's at now over the years i've tried just about every iteration of plex media server whether it was windows linux docker or even natively on the synology nas it is truly a goldilocks metaphor and there is no right answer for everyone it's one of those classic subjective it depends conundrums of what is going to work best for you so don't take my configuration as religious doctrine things might be different based on budget available bandwidth and a ton of other things the beauty of plex is in its availability of flexible configuration options in the beginning i simply installed the native plex media server app onto my synology because that's where all of my media files were also located makes sense right unfortunately the tiny little annapurna cpu in the synology just couldn't keep up with transcoding anything beyond more than one stream at a time when you've got multiple people in the house watching stuff well this can introduce some massive overhead and it only compounds because the cpu of your storage is also the cpu doing the transcoding so you could see where this goes bad very quickly when you're scaling i even tried running docker on the synology and just pulling down containers for plex and other apps and while that did work functionally we still had the same compounding problem all i was doing was introducing even more overhead and it didn't solve the problem at all some have had success using platforms like unraid and trunas that can host containers natively to get around this but it's not something i've tried yet to be fair quick side note while we're here transcoding operations are also one of those things that are handled better by gpus than cpus especially at scale so as we got into touring encoders in the 2000 series of nvidia gpus about four or five years ago we began to see plex adopt and support this functionality which again introduced even more configuration options and arguably even more barrier to entry and complication but i i digress after i recognize the limitations of the native synology implementation i didn't exactly have a spare full-size server and gpu laying around but i did have a dell g5 laptop with a mobile 2070 super in it so off i went on a grand adventure of discovery of what the best hardware and os config to host a plex media server would be what follows is a quick breakdown of how all of that went down over the course of the last year i first installed windows and worked like a champ no frills clean install nothing but plex laptop cpu and gpu were able to do the transcoding and i eventually connected it over 10 gig ethernet thanks to an external thunderbolt cal digit adapter and it was rocking and rolling but windows i thought that introduces a lot of bloat and wasteful overhead doesn't it let's try linux everything we need nothing we don't yeah that went about as well as you'd expect permissions issues docker compatibility patches breaking everything yeah i was over that pretty quickly next i thought oh old mac pros yeah big zeon chunky boy processors i even went and bought an old mac pro for a hundred bucks off of facebook marketplace fresh installed the latest os x and could literally never get the plex software working on it pretty to look at over there though so back to windows i went frankly it all just works and with some fine tuning you can actually remove almost all of the bloat from windows 10 fairly easily now with that all sorted out the next step was to build a proper server i'll give you a little teaser here of the server as we're in the middle of building it right now and the next video is going to be going deeper into the configuration of storage and the windows 10 os to be the best plex server possible as you might have seen in my studio tour video previously we've upgraded the 10 gig switch and have some netapp storage arrays going in so things are going to get fun and spicy as i continue to experiment with plex platforms the fun part of this whole thing is that plex can put a lot of load on a server's cpu gpu networking and even the connected nas so i'm looking forward to showing all of that to you soon in upcoming videos we're going to jump back in the workshop do some building on the new server put this all together and install it in the racks so make sure you subscribe to the channel here so you don't miss it if there's no notifications turned up we'll also go over how i do metadata management and storage management of the thousands upon thousands of media files that i now have in my collection using some popular open source software and hell maybe we'll even go over the configuration of those if you enjoy this kind of content from me drop a like down there it really does help and let me know what you'd like to see down in the comments below thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time take care [Music]

Channel: DatacenterDude

Views: 48,882

Keywords: plex, plex media server setup, plex media server build, plex media server windows 10, plex media server synology, plex media server ubuntu 20.04, plex media server build 2021, plex media server 2022, plex media server on synology nas, plex media server remote access, plex media server review, plex for windows, plex for mac, plex for linux, plex containers, datacenterdude, nick howell

Id: TxDLaal_iJg

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022