I Know Very Little About Plex - Hardware Suggestions

Kintarō Hattori

Hi Folks,

With a load of digital movies, music and photos I guess it's time I dabbled with Plex. I'm not looking for any information in regards to the software, I'm hoping someone can suggest some hardware suggestions.

I have a Chromecast and PS4 which I believe are both compatible so I'm looking for an inexpensive 'server/streaming' solution which I can stick a hard drive or two into and use to stream to the TV. Knowing nothing about the hardware I need a good place to start. While I'm aware I can go down the route of a raspberry Pi I'd prefer something that was less DIY. Would the below work or can you suggest something efficient and cheaper?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FU1RJKM?slotNum=33&SubscriptionId=AKIAIO22DD3AFUSKXUKQ&linkCode=g12&imprToken=wcoSu006RFo12CJcqOUEpw&creativeASIN=B01G1YI0NC&tag=mak044-21&creative=165953&camp=2025&th=1

Many thanks.

The high horse brigade

You need to consider if you want to transcode or not? A pi will do for a single direct play without transcoding, if you want to transcode you will need a decent CPU (or GPU hardware transcoding is available on some GPU's). Transcoding is multithreaded, the more cores the better. You also need to consider what resolution you are preparing for, 4k? 4k needs lots of space and also most hardware struggles to transcode it. I myself mostly download in 1080p but also some movies in 4k, if I download in 4k my setup is configured to also get a 1080p copy for transcoding, I have both in the same movie folder

Kintarō Hattori

The high horse brigade wrote: »

You need to consider if you want to transcode or not? A pi will do for a single direct play without transcoding, if you want to transcode you will need a decent CPU (or GPU hardware transcoding is available on some GPU's). Transcoding is multithreaded, the more cores the better. You also need to consider what resolution you are preparing for, 4k? 4k needs lots of space and also most hardware struggles to transcode it. I myself mostly download in 1080p but also some movies in 4k, if I download in 4k my setup is configured to also get a 1080p copy for transcoding, I have both in the same movie folder

I have no idea- why would you do that? I have lots of digital video, music and disk based media that I could convert. 1080p would do just fine but if it's not too crazy something that handles 4K would probably be a better option as I'll get a 4K TV sometime after the PS5 comes out.

Thanks for your reply btw.

The high horse brigade

Kintarō Hattori wrote: »

I have no idea- why would you do that? I have lots of digital video, music and disk based media that I could convert. 1080p would do just fine but if it's not too crazy something that handles 4K would probably be a better option as I'll get a 4K TV sometime after the PS5 comes out.

Thanks for your reply btw.

For streaming outside your own home to friends and family for use on all sorts of devices and handhelds etc on all sorts of connections, crappy broadband, mobile, hotel WiFi etc.

Kintarō Hattori

Ahhh cool, thank you. I'm really just looking for something I can use at home.

The high horse brigade

Kintarō Hattori wrote: »

Ahhh cool, thank you. I'm really just looking for something I can use at home.

My fear of the one you have linked is the support it would get. A Synology Nas would be a better buy and is well supported.

Have you looked at the Nvidia shield? It can act as both Plex client and server (very efficient as it has hardware support of the very powerful GPU) then you just need the media on your network on a Nas or pc

mcgovern

I've always used a HP Microserver, on my second one. They are slightly pricey but often have/had cashback offers on them to make them more reasonable.

johnybean

I would second the suggestion of the microserver. I have one myself serving 4 different tvs (all direct play playback using raspberry pis) and it has never let me down. I am in the process of upgrading to a supermicro 24 Bay server as my collection is starting to grow a bit so I would have a microserver avaliable pretty soon if you were interested.

Kintarō Hattori

johnybean wrote: »

I would second the suggestion of the microserver. I have one myself serving 4 different tvs (all direct play playback using raspberry pis) and it has never let me down. I am in the process of upgrading to a supermicro 24 Bay server as my collection is starting to grow a bit so I would have a microserver avaliable pretty soon if you were interested.

I'd certainly be interested. Can you send me on a PM with some specs and a price.

While the server end might be relatively easy to sort out, what sort of 'Client' do people use to hook up to their TV? Not sure if nay of these are useful but they reside in my living room:

Amazon 4K Stick
First gen chromecast
NowTV box
PS4/PS3/XBox 360

Conar

Kintarō Hattori wrote: »

I have no idea- why would you do that? I have lots of digital video, music and disk based media that I could convert. 1080p would do just fine but if it's not too crazy something that handles 4K would probably be a better option as I'll get a 4K TV sometime after the PS5 comes out.

Thanks for your reply btw.

I've used Plex for years and have always used a PC.
It gives me other options such as satellite TV and DVBT (rte etc).

I started using an Nvidia shield as a client about 6 months back and have to say it's brilliant.
Plays every format so never needs to transcode anything.
4k HDR rips that are about 30GB per hour stream over the network without any issue.

As mentioned above don't use 4k media if you're going to watch it on a 1080p device (transcoding because it needs to covert the 4k media to 1080p and send it over the network at the same time) as it's extremely CPU hungry. My old Plex server was an i5 6500 and couldn't even nearly handle it.

Do you have an old laptop or pc lying around that you could use?

A lot of this boils down to how many clients (TVs, phones, tablets, PCs) you want to serve.
Basically the NAS is probably only going to be any good if you're using direct play (nothing ever needs to transcode).

TuringBot47

mcgovern wrote: »

I've always used a HP Microserver, on my second one. They are slightly pricey but often have/had cashback offers on them to make them more reasonable.

+1

I've still got a trusty 4-bay Gen 8, which I got new for around €150 with the cashback offer at the time. Upgraded the ram and cpu over time.

But the Gen 10's are pricey new at over Gb£350 inc Vat
https://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower-servers/hpe-tower-servers/873830-421

There's an N54L for a little more palatable Gb£190
https://www.serversplus.com/servers/server-bundles/744900421-dvdrw

But you typically want to be fairly techie with them, they're not consumer devices. Or put something like FreeNas on it : https://freenas.org/about/features/

I put Centos 7 on mine and manually installed the Plex server.
My LG TV's have a Plex app which works, but they haven't updated the LG App in a while so there's the odd trouble trying to resume a film at the last location.

The high horse brigade

Fwiw I've told all my users I'm no longer supporting Chromecasts on my Emby server (I replaced Plex with Emby last year, they're nearly identical). I've had lots of issues with Chromecasts as they always seem to force transcode for no reason and have had several situations where they can hold playing media in memory for days as if it's paused. Chromecasts don't have very good support for .Mkv containers, it supports .mp4 so anything that it doesn't support has to be transcoded by the server.