Is Plex still a thing?

[Kol]

Plex pass user, running on a Dell 3060 micro, watching via infuse on Apple TV. Plex is great at sorting, managing the library but I find infuse is “smoother” than Plex itself. Paired together, it’s great. Has no problems playing the largest of 4K remuxes.

The Dell uses so little electricity, it’s a fantastic device.

 

[blairw]

What model QNAP please? Sounds like a beast!


rp2000

Sorry missed this - it's a TS-h1886XU-RP R2. It's absolutely bonkers overspecced and sounds like a jet engine but it lives in the garage and hasn't skipped a beat in the time I have had it. I could run Plex on a VM / Container on it to be fair but I like the separation between storage and server.
I'm slowly upgrading my networking to 10Gbe throughout the house via some new Unifi Switches, it's awesome using the SSD/nvme Storage as a network attached drive for my main PC and Mac

 

[rp2000]

Sorry missed this - it's a TS-h1886XU-RP R2. It's absolutely bonkers overspecced and sounds like a jet engine but it lives in the garage and hasn't skipped a beat in the time I have had it. I could run Plex on a VM / Container on it to be fair but I like the separation between storage and server.
I'm slowly upgrading my networking to 10Gbe throughout the house via some new Unifi Switches, it's awesome using the SSD/nvme Storage as a network attached drive for my main PC and Mac

Absolutely bonkers overkill, but soooooo impressive at the same time! Enterprise level kit for Plex!

It's so niche I can't even find any in depth reviews (just to read for fun!). The specs alone are mouthwatering for any storage nerd!


rp2000

 

[wigster]

This is not my experience with JF, I've got it installed on a 5,400rpm WD Red, cache and metadata too. How big is your library?

That said I seemto remember it having issues was when it used to transcode and it seemed like it'd try to transcode all of the file in one hit unlike Plex. However I believe they've changed that now - looking at the settings it seems to be set to throttle after building a buffer of 3 minutes. Though I transcode literally nothing on Plex or JF as I use my desktop as the server and don't want the CPU to be transcoding when I'm using it.

@edgedemon IIRC, AFAIK ripping is currently illegal in the UK, if that's the case I'd save yourself some time (and hassle).....

That's interesting I'm still building my library coming close to 500 films. It struggles with tone mapping and metadata is rather slow but lightning fast on a SSD.

 

[blairw]

Absolutely bonkers overkill, but soooooo impressive at the same time! Enterprise level kit for Plex!

It's so niche I can't even find any in depth reviews (just to read for fun!). The specs alone are mouthwatering for any storage nerd!


rp2000

I bought it with the aspiration of doing more with it... but time, responsibilities etc all take over. Longer term I will likely be hosting some other home automation type applications but right now it's doing a rock solid job of storing UHD and Blu Ray Remux, I don't settle for quality for right from disc at 1:1 is the preferred way forward.

 

[loftie]

That's interesting I'm still building my library coming close to 500 films. It struggles with tone mapping and metadata is rather slow but lightning fast on a SSD.

Just having a quick scroll through my films library (similar size to yours), plex displays unloaded art as blank/black before it loads it, whereas JF does what looks like a blurred preview before loading. I'd say Plex has a slight edge, but it is slight, and that's with plex loading 7 films per row vs 9 for JF. I don't do tone mapping so I have no idea on that unfortunately.

 

[edgedemon]

That was a chore!
I'm finally there now - DVD's have been ripped to ISO's and over the next few days I will re-encode one at various sample rates and resolutions and see what looks the best.
I have started adding my music in as well, it is a tortuous process, the albums are quite simple, but I have a massive dance music collection, from a very misspent youth which will require manual tagging by the look of it..
I do have a question over accounts though.
Im running Plex media server with a lifetime pass. What should I do for the rest of the family?
Should I get them to create their own plex logins and send them invites?
Or should I add them as managed users?
Ideally Id like for them to have the whole skip inro thing as well if it is possible

 

[something daft already!!]

With family, I create their own login and mates I set as managed users.

 

[Infidelus]

I have started adding my music in as well, it is a tortuous process, the albums are quite simple, but I have a massive dance music collection, from a very misspent youth which will require manual tagging by the look of it..

I don't know if this will help or not but I use MusicBrainz to tag my music in combination with Puddletag. I'm sure there's plenty of other software for tagging too .

 

[blairw]

Use

That was a chore!
I'm finally there now - DVD's have been ripped to ISO's and over the next few days I will re-encode one at various sample rates and resolutions and see what looks the best.
I have started adding my music in as well, it is a tortuous process, the albums are quite simple, but I have a massive dance music collection, from a very misspent youth which will require manual tagging by the look of it..
I do have a question over accounts though.
Im running Plex media server with a lifetime pass. What should I do for the rest of the family?
Should I get them to create their own plex logins and send them invites?
Or should I add them as managed users?
Ideally Id like for them to have the whole skip inro thing as well if it is possible

you’ve done a bit of an unnecessary middle step there, use MakeMKV to rip your discs (or now in your case the iso) straight to a .mkv container file which allows you just to have the native video and audio files from the disc for full quality. You can then if you want encode them to a lossy format using handbrake or something but I really wouldn’t bother, storage is cheap, better to have the best possible quality going forward as a base (circa 25-30gb per blu ray)

 

[robj20]

Just having a quick scroll through my films library (similar size to yours), plex displays unloaded art as blank/black before it loads it, whereas JF does what looks like a blurred preview before loading. I'd say Plex has a slight edge, but it is slight, and that's with plex loading 7 films per row vs 9 for JF. I don't do tone mapping so I have no idea on that unfortunately.

Isn't tone mapping handled by the TV.

 

[robj20]

That was a chore!
I'm finally there now - DVD's have been ripped to ISO's and over the next few days I will re-encode one at various sample rates and resolutions and see what looks the best.
I have started adding my music in as well, it is a tortuous process, the albums are quite simple, but I have a massive dance music collection, from a very misspent youth which will require manual tagging by the look of it..
I do have a question over accounts though.
Im running Plex media server with a lifetime pass. What should I do for the rest of the family?
Should I get them to create their own plex logins and send them invites?
Or should I add them as managed users?
Ideally Id like for them to have the whole skip inro thing as well if it is possible

You don't need to manual tag, get MP3Tag.
I regret re-encoding my TV series stuff and wish I'd left it as MKV.
I have a login for myself, the wife and one for the kids, only I can edit stuff. The kids can still skip intros.

 

[loftie]

Isn't tone mapping handled by the TV.

Don't know TBF. I've had Plex moan at me when I've told it to play something because I don't have a Plex pass so it won't do tone mapping, but the TV plays it with what seems like no issues, and the TV is an old samsung plasma so.

You don't need to manual tag, get MP3Tag.
I regret re-encoding my TV series stuff and wish I'd left it as MKV.
I have a login for myself, the wife and one for the kids, only I can edit stuff. The kids can still skip intros.

I've used MusicBee for my tagging, but I'll have to look at MP3Tag too, ta.

What made you regret re-encoding your tv stuff? I assume you mean from direct copies of your dvds?

 

[robj20]

Don't know TBF. I've had Plex moan at me when I've told it to play something because I don't have a Plex pass so it won't do tone mapping, but the TV plays it with what seems like no issues, and the TV is an old samsung plasma so.

I've used MusicBee for my tagging, but I'll have to look at MP3Tag too, ta.

What made you regret re-encoding your tv stuff? I assume you mean from direct copies of your dvds?

Didn't seem worth the time and money to encode them and save maybe 400mb per episode. 40min episodes.

What really bugs me with my latest approach is UHD stuff often goes above 100mb and my TV and indeed loads of them only have full speed rj45s sockets. I'm trying to limit my WiFi devices. Wish they'd put gigabit sockets on them.
So some of my UHD movies transcode to lower the quality.

 

[loftie]

Didn't seem worth the time and money to encode them and save maybe 400mb per episode. 40min episodes.

What really bugs me with my latest approach is UHD stuff often goes above 100mb and my TV and indeed loads of them only have full speed rj45s sockets. I'm trying to limit my WiFi devices. Wish they'd put gigabit sockets on them.
So some of my UHD movies transcode to lower the quality.

You know, I know TV manufacturers do this and yet it still never crossed my mind as a reason as to why certain files transcode. It may be the answer to many random transcodes a mate of mine has with his setup.

This is one instance where I'm glad to not be bothered by much smaller file sizes (to an extent)! I suspect you will get better results if you manually transcode a file down to the restriction limit before hand than letting Plex do it in realtime. You could also look into AV1 encoding - though I realise this runs counter to what I just said.

 

[rp2000]

Didn't seem worth the time and money to encode them and save maybe 400mb per episode. 40min episodes.

What really bugs me with my latest approach is UHD stuff often goes above 100mb and my TV and indeed loads of them only have full speed rj45s sockets. I'm trying to limit my WiFi devices. Wish they'd put gigabit sockets on them.
So some of my UHD movies transcode to lower the quality.

Force Direct Play via the settings in the Plex TV App (if available, I know it works on Samsung TV's). This should allow you to play remuxes without transcoding at full quality over your 100Mb TV ethernet port.


rp2000

 

[robj20]

Force Direct Play via the settings in the Plex TV App (if available, I know it works on Samsung TV's). This should allow you to play remuxes without transcoding at full quality over your 100Mb TV ethernet port.


rp2000

Just annoying needing to do that all the time.

 

[rp2000]

Just annoying needing to do that all the time.

If you enter the settings while playing the content it will only apply that setting to that file. If you enter the options while at the menu then the option sticks permanently for any media played for the TV.

I'll try to find a link or photo.

Edit:

rp2000

 

[john_smith]

Regarding re-encoding. What would you use if you had tv shows around 4gig an hour and wanted to bring them down to something less than 1 gig without a noticeably losing quality.

 

[Bubo]

Can't go wrong with

ffmpeg -i bigfile.mkv -c:v libx265 -crf 23 -c:a copy -c:s copy -o smallerfile.mkv

or to do a whole load of files one after another, cd to the directory where they are, create a new folder called encoded, and run this command

for %i in (*) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -c:v libx265 -crf 23 -c:a copy -c:s copy -o "encoded\%i"

Google ffmpeg to find that and how to install it, needs to be run from a DOS prompt, and path to the ffmpeg,exe file needs to be in your PATH environment variable.