Plex Media Server

Shlippery

Hey,

Fishing for some advice - I'm a late convert to Plex, absolutely love it - but it's running on my main desktop, nearly always on(it won't go to sleep with Plex running...) which is kinda frustrating / noisy at times!

Currently leaning towards a cheapish NAS with a Nvidia Shield for transcoding.

I don't want to spend a huge amount, at least at an early stage, but always happy to put more money into it further down the line - this is more of a trial.

One of my friends has a QNAP and swears by it.

What's the general consensus here?

Build tiny server myself? Or is the Nvidia shield a good idea ? - Unsure of the benefits of a Shield when I've a fully "Smart" TV / hooked up to desktop via HDMI, moreso thinking of it as the brains for the transcoding!


Ideally I want a minimal always on setup, that I can stream from when i'm away from home/travelling/hotels. etc

The high horse brigade

Smart tv is a sales gimmick. The CPU in a tv is pretty weak and the manufacturers don't keep the apps updated for very long. The Nvidia shield is much better and has continuous support through updates.

Grassey

I set up a raspberry pi as a media server connected to 2 6tb drives (1 for tv, 1 for movies) and use this to stream around the house - smart tv, PC, tablets etc. Can also access it outside the house on phone etc.
Was a cheap low powered set up, relatively easy to get up and running.

will56

Grassey wrote: »

I set up a raspberry pi as a media server connected to 2 6tb drives (1 for tv, 1 for movies) and use this to stream around the house - smart tv, PC, tablets etc. Can also access it outside the house on phone etc.
Was a cheap low powered set up, relatively easy to get up and running.

Hi,

What are you running on the Pi to use it as a server ?

Shlippery

Grassey wrote: »

I set up a raspberry pi as a media server connected to 2 6tb drives (1 for tv, 1 for movies) and use this to stream around the house - smart tv, PC, tablets etc. Can also access it outside the house on phone etc.
Was a cheap low powered set up, relatively easy to get up and running.

But the Pi would hardly be capable of transcoding no?

Cheers for all your tips lads, going to sit until potential sales at the end of the month and assess things, just want something tidy to hide in cabinet under TV.. Maybe the QNAP route.

The high horse brigade

Shlippery wrote: »

But the Pi would hardly be capable of transcoding no?

Cheers for all your tips lads, going to sit until potential sales at the end of the month and assess things, just want something tidy to hide in cabinet under TV.. Maybe the QNAP route.

The pi wouldn't be transcoding if you had a shield as Plex server. The pi could just be a NAS

I myself used have a local Plex server and a NAS but have now moved completely to the cloud. I store my media on an unlimited Google drive account (45TB so far) and pay for a Hetzner dedi server which I use as Plex server Snipped by Moderator

Dravokivich

The high horse brigade wrote: »

The pi wouldn't be transcoding if you had a shield as Plex server. The pi could just be a NAS

I myself used have a local Plex server and a NAS but have now moved completely to the cloud. I store my media on an unlimited Google drive account (45TB so far) and pay for a Hetzner dedi server which I use as Plex server Snipped by Moderator

What does that all cost?

Not sure if it's something I'd go for though as the main thing for me would be local network access without needing to use the internet.

The high horse brigade

Dravokivich wrote: »

What does that all cost?

Not sure if it's something I'd go for though as the main thing for me would be local network access without needing to use the internet.

The Hetzner server is €36pm, unlimited Google drive is €10pm then I also have Snipped by Moderator I have some others sharing the cost but it works out about €700 per year which is the cost of a few 6TB hard drives

The Ritz

Mod Comment

The high horse brigade,

Please see the notice at the top of all the Home Entertainment forums, discussion if obtaining media from non-official sources is forbidden here. Please keep it on topic, no reference to the source of your media is necessary.

Ritz.

jester77

QNAP are over priced, I have one and wouldn't recommend for what you want. The OS is utter rubbish, some old version of busybox, and they don't have a lot of power. Definitely not enough to transcode media for plex. It will run plex media server fine, and once you have a decent client it should be fine for direct streaming. As a NAS it is decent, but you are paying for convenience, especially if you go for the more powerful CPUs.

You would be better getting a lower powered QNAP (synology, drobo, or your own build) for hosting your media and using something like a NUC or shield for running the plex media server and mounting your NAS on that.

Something else that is looking promising is the Modulus M1 which will be released soon. It is its own self contained media server with support for netflix, prime, etc built in and allows you record tv and rip your own media to its internal drives. No idea on pricing yet but it is getting very good reviews.

grimeire

I totally agree with Jester77. we have Qnaps at work and they are rubbish. nothing but problems. Full of security vulnerabilities that leads to an endless amount of patching.

Do what i did buy a cheap server, install Freenas and then install Plex. cost me less than €350 and im using all my old HDD's in it. All the HDD are configured in a raid arrays to minimize chances of data loss. as the HDDs go Im upgrading them.
Its capable of transcoding up to 8 streams at once.

Honestly the best thing i ever did. no more people asking for this and that on USBs as its all on the server and can be easily accessed

Shlippery

Brilliant lads, appreciate it all, especially on leadup to "Black Friday"..

Currently set on the Shield at the moment, a more mainstream approach I suppose.

Any suitable recommendations of a simple NAS to pair with it?

SachaJ

Shlippery wrote: »

Brilliant lads, appreciate it all, especially on leadup to "Black Friday"..

Currently set on the Shield at the moment, a more mainstream approach I suppose.

Any suitable recommendations of a simple NAS to pair with it?

In my case I’m running an i7-4790 Windows 10 machine with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool a few hard drives together, about 12TB in total so not that bit. The same machine runs Plex Server and I have a couple of Nvidia Shields as the clients at the TVs. Works flawlessly.

This machine also acts as my cctv recorder with a further 12TB dedicated to that. It’s on 24/7

Ionised

I have been running my Plex Server on a Western Digital PR2100. This is a dual disc NAS which can perform transcoding and won't break the bank. Thus far, over a year, it has been pretty much faultless. It will support serving up at least 4 streams at once (I have tested this using two local streams and two remotely to my son in UK).
Plex is supported on many Smart TVs (The app on my recent LG has had a good few updates) and my son has a Hisense that he says works very well indeed. I also use a couple of chromecasts in the house.

It runs cool and very quiet (It sits next in my living room and you wouldn't even hear it)

jaggiebunnet

@Shlippery - did you go ahead and get the nvidia? how is it working out for you?

clintondaly

I just got and set up the Nvidia shield over the weekend(16 GB Version)
Installed/updated Plex and Plex server on it,connected a 500GB HDD and mapped it as an internal drive on the unit and then also connected up a 1TB HDD which has my movies etc.as an External Hard Drive
I have the Shield and both HDD's mapped on my laptop and can access both HDD's via laptop in terms of reading files,see below for writing to HDD.

I can download directly(using utorrent) into the 1TB HDD from my laptop but you can only write to 1 specific folder which is called "Nvidia Shield" in this folder I have now set up TV/MOVIE/MUSIC sub folders and have pointed plex to this location and also the location of the stuff on the 1TB prior to hooking it up

So far all is working perfectly,the one thing to bear in mind with the 16GB version is if your'e using plex etc. it needs to write the metadata to the internal drive which is why i mapped the 500GB as an internal drive,as if you had a lot of media as i do you will be taking the space from the 16GB drive.

Hope this helps people

Shlippery

jaggiebunnet wrote: »

@Shlippery - did you go ahead and get the nvidia? how is it working out for you?

Yea - following up here - Got the shield and it's brilliant. Working perfectly for Plex and have had a few friends/family using it simultaneously without flaw.

At the moment it's just attached to a spare 500gb external drive I had lying around. I'll invest in a more robust storage solution once I'm paid again! (it's been a rough Christmas!)

Otherwise though, quite happy with the Shield, absolutely zero regrets going down that route. Looks tidy, and it's nice having another bit of Google Assistant integration to complement my Google Home Mini.

positivenote

apologies if theres a level of ignorance here chaps... and if this is all explained in stickies somewhere apologies mods.
Im running Kodi on a fire stick and I'm looking to make the switch to Plex. I have a lot of movies/tv stored on an external hard drive (500gb). I also have a desktop windows PC lying around in the gaff not being used.... can I use this as a server or am I better off getting a shield? Also would I need to get one for each TV that I would hope to watch the content on or something else to act as a client with the server? (What do people recommend ?) Final Question is can I use flex to view my subscribed to Snip Netflix's etc...

Thanks for the advice

clintondaly

positivenote wrote: »

apologies if theres a level of ignorance here chaps... and if this is all explained in stickies somewhere apologies mods.
Im running Kodi on a fire stick and I'm looking to make the switch to Plex. I have a lot of movies/tv stored on an external hard drive (500gb). I also have a desktop windows PC lying around in the gaff not being used.... can I use this as a server or am I better off getting a shield? Also would I need to get one for each TV that I would hope to watch the content on or something else to act as a client with the server? (What do people recommend ?) Final Question is can I use flex to view my subscribed to IPTV and Netflix's etc...

Thanks for the advice

For your unused laptop you can put on the Plex server and hook up your hard drive and then have thew plex app on whatever devices you want to stream to.
I had it set up this way on a laptop but for playback etc. the fan noise on the laptop became annoying when transcoding etc. and this is an i5 8GB RAM HP laptop,this was because the laptop was in front of me on the coffee table,in your case you could put it behind the TV and may not have the noise issue.
To answer your question with regards buying the shield,I would say if budget allows then buy it,I have replaced a Roku,Android Box etc.by getting the shield and after all the reviews suggesting it was more a suitable for gamers more than anything else I would completely disagree,Yes its Suitable for gamers but I would not have bracketed it like that

positivenote

okay so I was chatting to a technician in work and he said that my best bet, for what I am looking to do was to get a Raspberry Pi for each of the 3 tv's that I am looking to view content through, load them up with kodi and stream the content that I have on my HDD through them...
If I am to go with such a set up how can the Raspberry Pi's get then content from the HDD? Is this where something like Plex come in? and hence the need a desktop or other device to 'host' the content that I have?
cheers