Plex Media Server

Soldato
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If you don't need to transcode (on a local network you should never need to) then I am totally happy with my Synology NAS. I have the DS1815+ which is the slightly older/larger version of the + models. I'd assume the newer ones can only improve on what I have. I put an extra 4GB stick of RAM into it though to make it 6GB.

I am able to run Radarr, Sonarr, Sabnzbd, and Hydra on this using Docker containers. Extraction of files is totally fine I don't notice it running slowly.

Plays 4K HDR files no problem via my Nvidia Shield TV running the Plex client.

Only downside is that the Plex Android app is reasonably broken at the moment and has an annoying buy they don't seem to be willing or able to to fix where fairly often the first time I open a file it simply closes and I have to open it again.
 
Soldato
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I am able to run Radarr, Sonarr, Sabnzbd, and Hydra on this using Docker containers. Extraction of files is totally fine I don't notice it running slowly.

Plays 4K HDR files no problem via my Nvidia Shield TV running the Plex client.

Perfect example, you have a low end (in PC terms) Atom C2538 with a CPU mark of just over 2K and mechanical disks, but thankfully Synology paid to enable hardware acceleration for transcoding. In Plex server terms it's pretty low end, *BUT* you have a decent client that can direct play pretty much whatever you throw at it and hopefully hardware transcoding will save you, even if it can't. Also your assertion that you don't notice it is exactly that, you don't noticing it, that's not to say it isn't happening. I used to run some remote Xeon 1230v3's (9K+ of CPU mark), 32GB and either 2x2TB SAS or 2x250GB 850 Evo's, IOWait was still sustaining values higher than it should on the SSD RAID0 set-up, it's a lot better on NVMe RAID, ether way, it's a thing. Ofcourse if your download is prohibitively slow you'll never notice.
 
Soldato
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Compared to download times, unpacking speeds are small for me. 48GB downloaded in 3 hours 20 mins, unpacked in 4 mins 50 seconds. I don't think I've ever sat there and willed it to unpack something faster. Most things are well under 48GB (looks like it roughly unpacks 10GB a minute).
 
Soldato
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Compared to download times, unpacking speeds are small for me. 48GB downloaded in 3 hours 20 mins, unpacked in 4 mins 50 seconds. I don't think I've ever sat there and willed it to unpack something faster. Most things are well under 48GB (looks like it roughly unpacks 10GB a minute).

Thats a straight unpack, wait till it needs to repair ;)
 
Soldato
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Quite rare for a repair to be required, but does happen.

Found one that downloaded 43.5GB in 3 hours. Unpacked in 6 minutes 45 seconds. Repaired (verified in 3 minutes 7 seconds) + (repaired in 2 minutes 38 seconds).

Slightly longer certainly but not excessively so. The whole point of a NAS for me is the always on and background processing it's doing, it doesn't need fast extract speeds as it's doing it often when I don't even notice it's doing it.
 
Soldato
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OK, this is likely to be a disproportionately long reply and i'm skipping a few bits due to time constraints.

The 'G' versions include iGPU, more cores the better when it comes to RAR/PAR work on a multipurpose server.

4K HDR and Plex is no more or less complex than you choose to make it. Think of the problem as a circle rather than a line, you can tweak any of the variables to get the desired result (eg throw a TR and 128GB into the mix and your poor client choice is irrelevant, but It breaks down as follows:

Assumptions
Transcoding overheads: 2K CPU/1080p 10K CPU/4k
Transcoding = *BAD*
It's free to make appropriate media choices and not free to change client's and servers.

Media
The natural assumption is bigger is better, while that's true to a certain extent in some situations (you don't want to watch something that looks like it was filmed on a potato), in this situation I assure you your significant others will not appreciate buffering because you chose poorly and have a 25GB rip with Atmos audio that can't be viewed remotely with your 2Mbit upload. If you want to choose completely inappropriate audio format/resolution that it's highly unlikely anyone can or will use or be supported by your your client's, then you will need to transcode and devote resources and/or cash to the server side.

Client
Many people seem to think that if it runs Plex, it's fine. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that, a bad client choice means that you can't direct play/stream your content and the server is forced to transcode. Some client's are just poor (PS3 for example though PS4 and XBO aren't exactly without issue). Again this requires you to change either the media type or have the the server resources to transcode.

Storage
Local storage is expensive up front, has ongoing costs and noise/heat, cloud storage is unlimited but has a small monthly fee, the down side is you're limited to your internet connection speed (hint: rent a cheap VPS/root/dedi with decent connectivity from Hetzner and use a CDN). Consider that your storage also needs to be where your server dumps it's transcoded content, will process it's NZB downloads and do RAR/PAR work along with the other services you are likely running (Tautulli, Netdata, Radarr/Sonarr, VPN, torrent client etc.) and on a single mechanical drive, that will likely be a bottleneck before anything else.

Connectivity
Wired connections should be mandatory, anything else will cause you issues at some point (choosing lower bit-rate media can mask a poor network choice), also consider if you chose remote cloud storage then you are WAN limited and that connection may be shared (Sky box' cache content, software uploads, downloads, other people in the household doing 'stuff').

Server
This is usually the area you see the biggest (and most expensive) mistakes made, those mistakes are often exacerbated by previous poor choices. Made a poor media choice and stored it on a cloud storage provider and think wifi is easy? Good luck. If you get the other parts right, then a Pi3 can make an acceptable Plex server. The other common mistakes are old hardware, that 1366 based Xeon from 10 years ago may seem like a beast, but it's basically a power guzzling, noisy room heater when it comes to Plex transcoding. If you are a Plex Pass subscriber then hardware transcoding can be a game changer, intel and Nvidia are the only credible options under Linux, in intel terms, later generations brought improved quality, Nvidia consumer cards are limited to two concurrent streams, Quadro isn't (but £3-400+ for a P2000 is harsh, that said 75w load) - you can use modified drivers under Linux to make consumer grade Nvidia cards to get 20+ streams (see SlothTechTV on YouTube). Also if running a virtualised solution (docker is your friend), passing through the iGPU or in fact any GPU will require a few tweaks.

Here's a curve ball - Hetzner, Myloc, NetCUP, SYS/Kimsufi and many others all provide a range of VPS/root/dedi boxes for very little, combine it with a CDN and GSuite Business and your life can be very much easier for very little outlay each month assuming you have the connection to make use of it. Hetzner Cloud instance starts at €2.99/month and comes with 10Gb connection, G Suite Business is circa £7, combine it with a domain + CDN and you're good to go. If you do choose to go down this route i'd suggest having a look at PlexGuide.com - it's going to make your life a lot easier.

This is probably one of the best most informative posts I've read in ages regarding Plex! Wish it had been about 4/5 years ago when I first started home serving media.

I run a socket 1155 xeon E3 1220v2 CPU (duel core i5 with 4 threads and more L3 cache) with 16Gb RAM, 12TB storage with Windows 10 on a 128GB SSD, also used for scrape and transcode. As well as Plex it runs Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Jackett, SabNZBd, Deluge native on win10 with docker running Ombi, Heimdall, Pihole, Tautulli, OpenVPN Server, Portainer and Watchtower.

This idles around 100w and pushes Plex to 4 clients one local (i.e. our Chromecast on the livingroom TV via Plex Mobile app) and 3 remote locations with multiple actual devices at each end point (family members). External is limited to 720p 4Mb per stream but internally its unlimited on the cat6 internal network (Chromecast has a network injector so not on wifi). The server has never skipped a beat, solid now as the day it was set up and I still fiddle with docker on a weekly basis to get the best from the server.

It does so much more than a NAS could for very little overheads, the parts I picked up second hand from the Members Market so in total other than the hard drives its cost me around £80 to build. Running costs are about £2 per day for electrical costs.

Android app work just fine for me, there was a spell when it was broken but looks to be fine now (until the next time they break it!)
 
Soldato
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This is probably one of the best most informative posts I've read in ages regarding Plex! Wish it had been about 4/5 years ago when I first started home serving media.

I run a socket 1155 xeon E3 1220v2 CPU (duel core i5 with 4 threads and more L3 cache) with 16Gb RAM, 12TB storage with Windows 10 on a 128GB SSD, also used for scrape and transcode. As well as Plex it runs Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Jackett, SabNZBd, Deluge native on win10 with docker running Ombi, Heimdall, Pihole, Tautulli, OpenVPN Server, Portainer and Watchtower.

This idles around 100w and pushes Plex to 4 clients one local (i.e. our Chromecast on the livingroom TV via Plex Mobile app) and 3 remote locations with multiple actual devices at each end point (family members). External is limited to 720p 4Mb per stream but internally its unlimited on the cat6 internal network (Chromecast has a network injector so not on wifi). The server has never skipped a beat, solid now as the day it was set up and I still fiddle with docker on a weekly basis to get the best from the server.

It does so much more than a NAS could for very little overheads, the parts I picked up second hand from the Members Market so in total other than the hard drives its cost me around £80 to build. Running costs are about £2 per day for electrical costs.

Android app work just fine for me, there was a spell when it was broken but looks to be fine now (until the next time they break it!)

I've never got on with off the shelf NAS devices, Synology in particular annoy me, the previous lifecycles policy made very little sense when the products they dropped support for often had near identical hardware to the stuff they were supporting, it just tended to roll down from the upper tiers and they simply refused to certify anything out of mainstream support or offer a paid option for extended OS support. Paying to be locked into an artificially short 3rd parties support cycle and bespoke hardware in the event of failure and paying a significant premium for the 'privilege' sucks, and that's before you look at the almost non existent upgrade options.

Realistically 4 years ago my advice would probably have been along the lines of what you built, I rated the Gen8 Microserver as decent value and it's CPU support list included the e3 1220v2. I still run an x99 based 2630L test server locally with very similar TDP and not drastically different CPU mark etc. (2630L is 8c/16t, 65w TDP, 8K CPU mark vs 1220v2 with 2c/2t, 69w TDP and 6.68K CPU mark), it's due a 980GTX soon to play with modified linux drivers and evaluate NVenc quality as well as passthrough to docker vs bare metal. OS wise I favour UnRAID or Ubuntu with docker, but the best OS choice anyone can make is an OS they feel comfortable with. My main build is an R1700/32GB/50TB+ a few SSD's for VM's/docker use running UnRAID, for a 65w TDP chip it's ideal as a VM/docker host.

Your power numbers seem a little off, 100w comes out at 2.4Kw/day, allowing for load call it 3Kw/day, my unit price is just over 13p/Kw so even allowing for load you're likely talking about under 40p/day including VAT or £12/month. Most of the builds I deal with now are VPS/dedi boxes based in EU data centres with CDN for smooth streaming and cloud storage for media, the advantage is you have everything coming in/going out at gigabit speeds or better, that alone is worth a few euro/month.

If you're interested in Plex, running a dedicated local server or exploring hosted options with either local or unlimited cloud storage, you may want to have a look at www.plexguide.com or r/plex on reddit, the former is quite friendly, the latter can be a little more mixed, but the interesting Plex stuff normally ends up on reddit first.
 
Soldato
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Yeah your right numbers are off, got distracted whilst writing the post :o not interested in cloud or off site server at the moment it's more for local media serving rather than external.

Will take a look at the links though. Thanks.
 
Associate
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Sorry to Hijack, tell me to start my own thread if this is not a generic one haha.

Just installed Plex server on main PC, have installed the android app on android box downstairs - it picks it up and displays the few films I put in there to test.

I tried to play a film and it hit me with a subscribe or one time fee of 3.30 so I just paid it even though I thought it was free.
However when I try to play a film it says cannot find server.

All looks ok in the settings, android box is shown under devices on server etc. All is set to direct play, I even tried lowering it. All hard wired Ethernet.

So I tried it on my Samsung ks8000 TV even though the PC is connected to it, and that works just fine through the same network.

Any ideas?? It is really annoying me haha.

Thanks,
Sean
 
Soldato
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Force stop the app on Android, then once you have restarted it, in the top left corner hit menu button then select sever you want to connect to.




Edit...

Just looked over my android app and it appears they have removed the select server option, it will default to the server unless it is off line then it will reset to local on device content or synced content.
 
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Force stop the app on Android, then once you have restarted it, in the top left corner hit the three stripe menu button then select sever you want to connect to.

Will give that a bash, not sure how to force stop on the box though - just got a cheap usb mouse connected as a remote. Ill figure it out, did I need to pay the 3.30 or was that for something else?

Thanks,
Sean

** Did not work, will restart both server and client see if that helps :( **
 
Last edited:
Soldato
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Will give that a bash, not sure how to force stop on the box though - just got a cheap usb mouse connected as a remote. Ill figure it out, did I need to pay the 3.30 or was that for something else?

Thanks,
Sean

The server is free, the player (android part) is paid for unless you have a Plex Pass subscription.

Goto settings, then apps, find the app, then hit force stop, should be the same on any android device
 
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The server is free, the player (android part) is paid for unless you have a Plex Pass subscription.

Goto settings, then apps, find the app, then hit force stop, should be the same on any android device

Restarted server and app - logged out and logged back in. Came up server needs to be certain version and could not connect.

I think it may be because the android box is on 5.1 android? maybe the plex app is too old for the latest server on my PC?

Tried a ps4 in the house and that worked straight away no problem too.

Im giving up for tonight but welcome anymore suggestions, is Emby paid for on android side do you know?

Thanks again,
Sean
 
Soldato
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Never used Emby so no idea about that.

It does sound like android version is your draw back. What settop box is it? Possible to flash a newer firmware like Lineage?
 
Soldato
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My understanding is Plex for Android is 5.0+, unfortunately ‘Android box’ is generally a euphemism for ‘poorly designed hardware with falsified certifications and poor design that has been abandoned’ and often they don’t make the best choice for a Plex client or anything else. In your case, you say you are running Lollipop (from 2014?), since then we’ve had four major version releases including Oreo which is 9.xx if memory serves, it’s quite out of date in android terms, but it should still run Plex. However the bigger question is should you?

The first rule of Plex is your clients capabilities and connectivity should dictate your server and media choices. Choose poor clients, feed them unsuitable media that they can’t direct play via an inappropriate connection (Wi-fi for example) and you will generally make things more difficult than they need to be, you can offset this by over specification on the server side to handle the transcodes, but with better planning the whole thing could be a lot easier. I’d suggest looking into updating your box OS to something more modern, but that will depend on the availability of compatible ROM’s.


Emby is (some would say was) a more open version of Plex, it had a different model than Plex in terms of feature access and certainly lacked in device support, however they developed reasonably quickly and were generally perceived as the ‘good guys’ following Plex’ move to a commercial product and some highly sketchy attempts to moneterise it’s user base and make use of our data/limit our ability to use our own servers/push ‘features’ (eg unless you change your Plex settings, if the Plex authentication server is down, you can’t play the media on your server that’s on the same network all of 3 feet away). Emby has many areas that feel a little rough around the edges, but it has a lot of features that are great, IPTV support is way better than Plex, hardware accelerated transcoding etc. Either way it’s not relevant to your issue, but is another option you may like to look at.
 
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Minix Neo XBH Plus is the box. I updated it around 6months ago, I think that 5.1 was the latest I could find.

Its only to play x264 2.0 audio in a .mkv 1080p so I assume it should be able to direct play as long as the right audio track is selected.

Didn't realize Lineage did boxes thought it was just phones.

Thanks,
Sean
 
Soldato
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Not the worst of choices, they at least updated it with an official 5.1.1 ROM and the hardware should be capable of what you want.
 
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This has been a really useful thread. I've been using Plex for years after switching over from MediaPortal however I didn't even know things like Sonarr etc existed. I've recently got a new server on the cheap to replace my ageing box so thought I'd make use of some of the other features. I was running an old AMD 240e with 8GB RAM that was about 10 years old, but have acquired an i7-2600, 24GB RAM and moved my array from RAID5 to RAID10 so have a bit more grunt.
 
Soldato
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This has been a really useful thread. I've been using Plex for years after switching over from MediaPortal however I didn't even know things like Sonarr etc existed. I've recently got a new server on the cheap to replace my ageing box so thought I'd make use of some of the other features. I was running an old AMD 240e with 8GB RAM that was about 10 years old, but have acquired an i7-2600, 24GB RAM and moved my array from RAID5 to RAID10 so have a bit more grunt.

You've got about 8 years of catching up to do :D Automation is much more efficient than doing things manually, when you get your head round SONARR/RADARR/LIDARR, Ombi and Tatulli, combine them with SAB/NZBGet and Deluge/rTorrent with VPN built into the docker and when you get fed up of doing it all on your home connection with local storage you can move to a VPS/Cloud solution with unlimited storage and massively faster connectivity. If you do it right your only need to interact with your server should be to add anything to the monitor list that isn't automatically imported from the sources you set it to pull lists from.
 
Soldato
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Looking to add a Plex server to my home.

I don't really have any spare parts laying around and want to use my current PC (maybe upgrade if needed) to be my main PC as well as the Plex server.

My question really is - Can i set CPU priority on Plex? I use Ubuntu.
The only game I play on PC is CSGO and that is relatively low core count. So I was wondering if I could maybe limit Plex to just a few cores?
 
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