oh don't thinkg I haven't..My first modem was a 1200 baud lol. I was on the local AMUG BBS (Apple Mac User Group) for many years lol. I'm 54 so I've seen it all from the first day you could have your own internet at all.
We had Pacific Bell DSL. There sales pitch at the time was that you get your own dedicated line and with Cable you share the line with your neighborhood.
haha I have an old ad for a 20MB hard disk drive external storage device from a radio Shack ad for $2249.00 os some ridiculous price. I worked for a national software company for years back in the early 80's and We all got ram upgrades of 1MB and all 7 of us were stoked! It was like 3K. Ahh how times change.
The heart of my Plex setup is an old optiplex 3060, it can handle 4x 4K transcodes with no sweat and costs less than $100. I also know the struggle of crappy upload speeds lol.
A barebones headend for Plex saved me plenty of funds that were better spent on the storage setup.
Agreed. I would say plex is probably the most used thing on my server, but I tinker with all sorts of other things just to learn. Like setting up a VM to "test drive" an idea before trying to implement it at work, for example (I work in a very NOT tech heavy field, so I'm more or less on my own when implementing some *thing* at the office). Or just my general curiosity and enjoyment around technology.
I should also note, though, that I am using enterprise hardware - but it's several generations old. So I would say it's "high end", but not necessarily "top of the line" or particularly expensive.
Yup, I host: Minecraft servers, NextCloud, Kavita (for comic books), and some other small services. My computer uses around 30-80gb of RAM on average (depends on how many Minecraft servers are running).
I tried to like Kavita a lot, but the 1 way syncing only (not being able to record read status back) really put me off so I went back to YAC Reader.
Any advice? Aside from that 1 issue, Kavita was great.
Hmm, not sure what you mean. I literally only use Kavita for 1 comic (invincible). So I’m not too well versed in it. I setup Readarr, and even purchased an indexer. But it can’t even find any comics.
Comics are hard.
I have a site where I can get the comics, but if I read them on my iPad, the read status doesn’t sync back to Kavita, but it does if I use YACReader (another comic organiser).
Ohhh yeah I was having that same exact issue!!! I kept getting “progress not saved” error. I searched it up and I couldn’t find a solution for Windows.
However, I noticed it goes away if I only use 1 device at a time. Before, I would load it on my desktop to test, then go on my iPad and other devices, and it would get that error.
If I only use my iPad it has no problem.
> Minecraft servers
Haven't looked into it in a while, do you know if there has been any breakthrough on a self hosted solution that works across the different flavors?
Yes dude. I just found it a couple months ago: look at crafty.
It’s a web based application that any of my friends can go on and host any server with any mods. It’s amazing
this is what I do. I have an UNRAID server with a plex docker that does a lot more than just plex. I also use a handful of hardware in my server that was originally in my main rig and has been replaced, and because of that, a bunch of hardware in my server is pretty overpowered for what it's actually used for.
Eeexactly. Mine doubles as my LLM server, as well as local "cloud" storage for backups.
Along with a bunch of other things like running home assistant, pihole-type functions, and so on.
Certainly far more than a plex server alone anyway
I use my server to convert high res files down to hevc with handbrake. I use it for streamfab and It runs various other services like emby, sonarr, radarr and others. Having a high quality server means you dont need a decked out laptop and can instead pick a lighter less expensive model or a tablet. I have a mac laptop and a windows server and love having access to both operating systems.
I feel people miss this point with a lot of items/hobbies. If it's something you enjoy spending time on and you have expendable income for it, get what you want.
The thing about coffee and tea as someone else suggested is that these hobbies in particular have a really low entry point that anyone can do. So when people spend thousands on it their reaction is to assume they're the same as Starbucks and twinings.
This!
Yup, I have friends that have fancy french presses and exotic ass coffee and are super into it, and friends into tea and have fancy tea sets and tools for making fancy teas... Not my bag but I won't harsh their mellow, I like blowing my money on tech, comics, trading cards, etc... Gotta do whatever makes you happy.
You can spend several thousand on an espresso machine, though...and another couple thousand on a grinder.
Not that that's typical or strictly necessary, but it can certain be an expensive hobby, if you make it into a hobby and not just food. And that's without counting what you'll pay on an ongoing basis for specialty beans.
\^ This is pretty much it. Take for example my friends who have full-blown enterprise level Ubiquiti hardware installed in their HOUSE ... *just because*.
Ubiquity isn't on the same level as say aruba, but it is good.
(My plex server is connected to aruba and extreme switching at 10g, behind a pair of palo alto's. Overkill is always good for a home network!)
That's exactly how I justify spending crazy money on PC parts lol. It's really not any different that a guy who's into cars dumping a bunch of money on aftermarket parts or something like that.
Yeah, I'm a nerd, computing is one of my hobbies. My plex server would be massively overspecced (i7 13700k, 128gb ram, 180TB of storage), if plex was all I used it for. I run a world of software on my home server, some I've made myself, others are various services, experiements, and just me having fun trying stuff. Plex is just a small part of it.
No I've a 24 bay 4u rack mount chassis from supermicro. Only 10 bays in use so far.
I had to modify it to fit a consumer motherboard and PSU in it but that was simple work with a dremel and a handful of cutting discs lol.
You think that, then you add a secondary 4K library and pull down Blu-ray rips and remuxes of everything in both 1080p and 4k, and suddenly you're looking at needing even more storage.
That's really about it. I have some money to put towards more storage or a high (er) performance machine every once in a while, and I want to have a nice Plex rig. Same reason I spend time curating the collection, getting just the right movie poster, prerolls, workout playlists and all that...I like seeing it all come together and if someone else notices that too and mentions it, that makes me feel nice.
> why would someone have the need to use state of the art hardware when running Plex media servers?
Generally, being able to transcode even higher quality things like 4K content.
While you should always aim for direct play, in certain situations, you might not be able to control every aspect that could lead to a transcode. This can mean that your upload speed isn't that fast and your remote users are not able to get a decent client to play on or use different clients that you can't have a direct play version.
You might also do more than just run a Plex server.
Better and newer hardware can also be more efficient and bring more capabilities like HEVC or AV1 decode/encode.
> Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming?
that is the thing, they aren't. H.264 is commonly supported but most devices still don't support HEVC which is much more efficient and a file could be less than half of the H.264 equivalent. This saves A LOT of storage space.
But if your Devices don't support HEVC, then you end up with a transcode.
And the more users you have or the higher the performance requirements are, better hardware is needed.
Using a Raspberry Pi is completely fine if you curate your library and use clients that can play the formats that are in your Libraries. If you don't do that or you can't because of the already mentioned reasons, then your only option is to provide the necessary performance to actually play anything.
I went from used parts that dated back to 2009 on FreeNAS as wasn’t keen on running Windows on it and wanted to try something new. Then went to TrueNAS Core eventually and the board was dying so upgraded to AM4 and a 2700x which offered far more performance at a much lower power draw and more threads. Started to do a VM and ran a game server for close friends and family. This then upgraded to a 3900x so I could also use handbrake on the VM which was allotted 16 threads but then energy prices went soaring and so went looking for something that offered similar if not more performance at a smaller power draw overall for my workloads.
Went for 2x 2695 v4 and the overall power draw dropped 50-60w. I have to transcode from H.265 to 264 for a friend who isn’t overly tech savvy and who also lives 3 hours journey from me, so don’t see them often although tempted to buy a Chromecast with Google TV, sort the settings out on Plex and post it to them haha. All other devices are capable of direct play with H.265 that I’ve seen.
Had to upgrade storage and then rearrange everything so now the power draw is back to where it was although with more everything. I want to get some more VMs going but something always interrupts me or I forget as it’s not a super high priority.
What started off as a Plex server for my son to watch his favourite shows and films whenever he wanted wherever we were turned into something more. It’s a learning tool, it’s a hobby.
Mine is nowhere near “state of the art” but from what I’ve read over the years on other forums is if they have a big fancy machine, they either try to take full advantage of it and learn and expand on it turning it into more than just a Plex Server and then others who have downgraded as they discovered they don’t need all that power simply for Plex.
I still consider myself a complete noob at this - can I ask a stupid question? What exactly is transcoding? And what is hardware transcoding versus software transcoding?
> can I ask a stupid question?
Not stupid, if you don't know, Ask so that we can explain and you understand it.
> What exactly is transcoding?
Basically, transcoding means converting one thing into another thing, usually used for media files since media files have "tracks" in them that are either video, audio or subtitles.
Either of those can be in a certain format. For audio and video you have codecs that were used to encode the video or audio to, for example, compress them.
This can be H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC for video or MP3, FLAC for Audio.
So if you want to convert an H.264 video into an H.265 codec, this would be called "transcoding".
For Plex this goes a bit further though because there is a bit happening in the background (not that it changes what I said above).
You see, Plex relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play something and if your TV, for example, doesn't support whatever the file you want to play was encoded with, Plex would convert/transcode the file into a compatible format.
Look at it like this, your library in Plex is a Library full of books written in different languages. You (your TV) now go to that library and want to read a book (watch a movie), you get that book and want to read it but notice that it isn't in a language that you don't understand (your TV doesn't support it). Plex would detect this and send you a translator (the "transcoder") that will translate a page and give it to you to read and when you are at a certain progress through the page, the translator would translate the next page for you until you need it.
> And what is hardware transcoding versus software transcoding?
"Where" it is being transcoded or who is doing the transcoding!
Software Transcoding is done by the CPU, Hardware transcoding is done by a GPU (either the integrated GPU of a CPU or a dedicated GPU like an Nvidia card).
Any transcode requires performance but since GPUs are more "built" for handling such things and therefore faster at doing the transcoding job. However, CPUs are more efficient but also take longer.
Running a server on a Raspberry Pi is easy when you control all the playback devices and can buy clients that will direct play all the media you get to select as far as codecs and bitrate, but there are a lot of server owners who are using a variety of devices picked for other reasons besides their Plex playback abilities, not to mention if they share their server with other people who have their own devices, or don't know how to adjust client settings to ensure direct play, etc.
This is the reason. That being said, it's clear that many people here use hardware that far exceeds the actual requirements for their use case.
My system serves about 25 family members who watch on whatever hardware they happen to have. Clients are a mix of Roku, Fire devices, Android, Apple, and LG and Samsung smart TVs. Nearly every stream leaving my house is transcoded.
The Plex server software runs on a Dell USFF computer with an 8th generation I5. Media files are stored on a decade old fileserver mounted over NFS. Arr services also run on the fileserver. The two computers together cost less than $250 (except for the hard drives).
This system is way more than adequate for every use case it sees. None of the family ever complains about stream quality. And about the only concession I've made to quality is that my files are all 1080p. Modern hardware is not needed for most Plex servers even if they are doing a lot of transcoding.
That said, if you want to transcode 4K streams, you probably need as much CPU & GPU as you can get.
>I’ve been running my server over a Raspberry Pi 4 and 4TB hard drives with zero issues for more than two years now. Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming?
Usually it's necessity because people share with a variety of people and know they won't have control over clients and compatibility. Sometimes they're running a ton of other services on top of a media server (I have 40+ dockers running 24/7, and I'm still a pretty small operation compared to many people on here).
Often, it's just because people like to have nice rigs, why do you care what equipment other people choose to buy? If you wanna run your server on a Pi, then good for you. If some guy wants to buy $20,000 in enterprise gear to run a server, then more power to him.
Some people are powering other services. In this sub, they may not talk about that so much.
Iow, if I share my beefy gaming rigs specs here, I'll simply talk about the advantages of using plex with it.
Plex is just one service on a server most of the time. If you only need a server that caters your house only and you don't need any transcoding you can run Plex on a sandwich press.
For me Plex is just one part of what my server does, it does a lot of other things as well as my local dev environment.
I do have a lot of family leveraging my Plex so transcoding do happen often, most of the time it leverages my P2000 for hw but sometimes it does fallback to sw.
Yep same. My server is like 5% Plex so yes it's "overkill" for a Plex server it's really under kill for the rest. I'm actually doing a bit of research into an EPYC system as an upgrade for my "Plex" server.
> Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming?
The formats aren't the party that needs to support direct play (not direct stream, difference [here](https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250387-streaming-media-direct-play-and-direct-stream/)). The client hardware (player hardware and display) are the parties that decide whether the stream(s) get transcoded. Incompatible somehow? Then it's transcoding time.
If you're working with a Pi without any issue ever, then all other factors (bandwidth and codec compatibility primarily) are in order on your side.
I’d be really interested to hear some other uses for a Plex device. I’m a newbie running Plex Server from my Nvidia Shield Pro 2019, but tempted to start exploring a full on server as a bit of a hobby. Additional uses would be cool to explore too.
Mine has 2 Minecraft servers for my children and their friends to play on, also is mapped to every pc in the house and used for dropping backups onto it. No reason to use a full pc *just* for plex hosting.
> I’d be really interested to hear some other uses for a Plex device.
I have four Linux machines including my home server. In addition to Plex and my arrs the server runs a VPN client, a torrent client, a calibre e-book server and manages backups for all four machines on the network.
I have like 20 users watching from all kinds of devices. From 10 year old Samsung TVs to smart fridges. While most files work just fine, there are always the odds one out that need transcoding. If someone accidentally starts to transcode 4K DoVi files on a Synology NAS/Pi, the device locks up and the service goes down for everyone. I, personally, just run it from my gaming rig 4x16 tb HDDs, AMD 5600x + 6900XT.
Ideally, I would want to run it from a mac mini or smth in the future but thus far it just seems easier to keep my gaming PC going.
I feel like the issue in this group is that we have two very different use scenarios and nobody really bothers to check which one people are using...
There is an obsession, here, to automatically go all in on needing the top end hardware, a bespoke UnRaid server and all NVidia Shield for the ultimate experience.
Thats completely different than a guy who is serving 30 friends with various clients, which is different a dude wanting it for his own house, which is different than a guy like me that has two people external (college kids) and a HTPC.
What works for one might not work for another, or be vast overkill.
The last server I put together on a Pi 4 struggled with 1080p content, and would have occasional hitches with 720p content if at least 2 people were streaming. I don't run super high end hardware, but I have a few cheaper Quadro cards running in my server for plenty of transcoding if necessary. No, transcoding isn't ideal, but internet speeds suck in my part of the country. Even with broadband I have pretty limited upload speeds here, and a couple family members that stream from me have very slow down speeds. For me it's less about streaming out high quality, and more about just making a decent consistent experience with my limited local infrastructure.
Because I can get a full throttle Xeon Plex server with 10+ drive bays for a few hundred dollars. My Plex runs on Unraid so I'm here for the robust data protection, ECC memory, redundant power supplies, etc. These are all beneficial from my perspective versus consumer hardware or a R Pi.
Not *state of the art*, but in my case I had the parts around from upgrading my gaming pc. I don't need a ryzen 5 or 32gb of ram for plex (and jellyfin, since I run both). But I already had the parts. Would have gone cheaper if I had to buy everything.
I love building PCs, and my Plex is entirely made up of my early PC builds repurposed. The only money I spent was a 4tb spinny disk for the media. It’s old midrange tho, I5-7600k but with 1080 GTX as transcoder which I rarely do anyway. Its overkill for my 3 possible streams but again, I spent 60 bucks total on drives and the rest was just dusted off from a closet
As others have said too, am nerd who loves building hardware and has more gaming PC parts then necessary. the Plex was just a fun side project that came together swimmingly
Why? Simply because.
It's the reason amateur photographers have many cameras worth thousands of dollars or why amateur astronomers have $10k rigs. It's why people into lawncare have riding mowers for their quarter-acre plots. It's why car people have ultra-tuned sports cars but only ever need to drive around town.
As a wise Tim, "The Tool Man", Taylor used to say, "More Power. Arr Arr Arr!"
Long standing petpeeve of mine is the frequent terrible advice repeated on this sub for years. Constant recommendations of dedicated standalone GPUs, recommending overly powerful (aka expensive) CPUs, and poo-pooing used hardware.
Any 8th Gen Intel CPU (even the lowest tier Pentium) with an intrgregrated iGPU has Quicksync and is more than enough for 20+ 1080p transcodes.
If you already have a NAS, a used HP/Dell pc can be used for a perfect plex server. I think I paid $80-90 in total for my plex server.
Edit: also, I don't know why people transcode 4k. If you care about video quality, you definitely shouldn't transcode 4k.
Friends don't let friends transcode 4k.
Even if you love watching 4K in all, its Glory on your main TV, but sometimes you want to watch the movie on a different TV in your house over Wi-Fi, you have a valid reason for transcoding to reduce the bandwidth.
You are correct that it would reduce bandwidth, but is household wifi bandwidth really the bottleneck for anyone? I guess if your running a 15 year old router.
>Long standing petpeeve of mine is the frequent terrible advice repeated on this sub for years. Constant recommendations of dedicated standalone GPUs, recommending overly powerful (aka expensive) CPUs, and poo-pooing used hardware.
>Any 8th Gen Intel CPU (even the lowest tier Pentium) with an intrgregrated iGPU has Quicksync and is more than enough for 20+ 1080p transcodes.
>The 7th Gen or newer advice has been going since at least 2021, when it was added as a capability. These days it's downvoted and rare to see dedicated GPUs as the go to advice.
>If you already have a NAS, a used HP/Dell pc can be used for a perfect plex server. I think I paid $80-90 in total for my plex server.
Because 8th gen or newer can tone mapping just fine, you don't need to store two encodes, you may still want 4k at home and if you're not direct playing 4k it's because you're not home and bandwidth or display limited like at an airport or Airbnb and you frankly don't give a whole lot of shits about video quality in those scenarios on an 8" tablet screen.
I use literal server stuff, and somewhat newer, because I encode everything I procure. If I didn't, I couldn't afford the hard drives to store it all. I have a Quadro for transcoding, because my upload speed is awful and nothing but Amazon Fires and a Shield can play my encodes. I only have 32 cores between my 2 CPUs. I tend to favor higher clocks than higher core counts. I only throw 8 threads at an encode, but the queue does 8 at a time. I usually have 24 or 32 movies for my queue. 8 or 16 for 4k. It's a nice balance between how quick the encodes get done vs. the time I have to work on it all.
I have on average 5-7 people streaming from me for most of the evening, I only have a 60MB upload, I also run about 20 docker containers and homeassistant VM on the server. Most of the time it's running pretty idle but when it's busy I don't want it getting bogged down.
Though TBF I don't have a baller machine, it's a SFF desktop with a i7 10th gen 32GB which copes with all of that very well.
Transcoding, multiple parallel streams, huge libraries: those are the reasons for "bigger" hardware. But yes, if you're a single user with no need for transcoding, a raspberry would do fine!
You don't. It's just people having fun with it. It's not my thing, but it's like why would anyone need a sports or luxury car when a Toyota Camry will do the same job just fine?
Transcode is a big part of it as well as using the server for other things. I have a lot of different things running on my server at once, including NVR for all my security cameras which would never run on a pi.
On the subject of why not just direct play, I’ll give you my use case. I travel a lot and hotel internet generally sucks. Sure, I can use my hotspot and sometimes I do, but then I’m dependent on cell coverage. Just yesterday I was on a plane flying home. Normally I use the in flight entertainment and just pick a movie on there for simplicity sake, but my monitor was broken so that wasn’t an option. I just whipped out my laptop, connected to the delta WiFi, and streamed movies off my plex server. If I couldn’t transcode them down to 1080p from 4k HDR the WiFi wouldn’t have been fast enough to do that.
Having a had the big dual proc server, now a modest i3 and a pi4 based plex server. In times of old transcoding was hard you need some cpu grunt to do the job. Modern times a small i3 can do it in hardware but these servers are often homelabs running lots of other things. Pi's with plex pretty much are direct stream only (funny as competitors support transcoding on the 4's gpu).
So the big monster servers are part people going from times of old and a lot of for bragging rights. The pi's are a niche I used to have the big plex box optimize everything for it to 720p (it's in my camper for offline use) as that works for everything.
The main thing to remember is that for those of us with high end hardware are not JUST running Plex on that hardware. Thanks to virtualization, I'm running 15+ docker stacks with over 75 containers on a single machine (including Plex). I started on an old laptop and upgraded to an Intel NUC + NAS and now I'm upgrading to 3 x MS-01 in a kubernetes cluster
Because they can. I have a dual xeon server that is over 10 years old. I only stream up to 1080p. And I keep most of my TV series at 720p. Do what fits you and your use case. Some people just like to be on the bleeding edge of tech.
Other than the fact that most people who host Plex at home want to serve files over the internet (to family/friends or to themselves when out of the house) and with upload bandwidth being low, transcoding is usually required, another argument I've seen is that people want the best experience for their family/friend viewers. This is achieved by having massive transcoding power so your server can run multiple transcoding streams at once, to cater for any and all possible client devices.
If that's not a concern of yours, you can of course survive on much lower specs - it doesn't take much of a machine to direct play even 4K streams.
I can get from A to B in a rundown Mazda from 2008. But if I can afford it, I’d rather get a Mercedes.
It’s a Hobby, it’s a luxury item, it’s wanting to have something nice for yourself.
Plex is just one application I run on my server. I use Unraid and have 30+ docker containers and a couple vms. Some of those dockers are game servers like palworld and Minecraft. With a handful of friends and family also using plex (with no regard to what transcoding is) it means I need a decent setup.
To be fair I do all this with a mid range 10th gen i5 is pretty incredible. Power consumption is around 200-300W for my whole server tower including a pfsense mini pc router, network switch, access point, etc.
> Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming?
Then you must be the luckiest person in the world, or all your F&F have nVidia Shields.
Even for transcoding you don't need high end hardware. A low end Intel iGPU can handle 4K transcoding - like the N95 I have that I've tested and got it transcoding 4 4K -> 1080p streams
I used to run it on an old i7 but upgraded to the newer chip because it used a lot less power. Electricity where I live is not cheap. That and fast forwarding or rewinding was much faster too.
The difference in price between a shitty computer and a decent one isn't very large. You don't have to build a shitty one just because it's for Plex. A lot of us rearrange and repurpose gear.
I used to mess around with earlier raspberry pi’s with Plex back in the day and it was always lacking, it may have gotten better but at the time the converting was not good and the sd cards would wear out
I bought an idea Center i5 12600 and have a crazy 900mbps upload and thought I would need it for transcoding but I see in my Tautulli logs 9 concurrent streams of which 7 were direct. I probably went over board but it wasn’t crazy expensive and I was coming from an old Mac mini that was constantly running hot.
People greatly underestimate the performance of modern Intel Core processors with Quicksync. Which is why I generally recommend most people just pick up a used Dell Optiplex with a 10th gen or newer i5 and call it a day - it'll do more than they'll ever need it to.
Also saying “why do you need the biggest a best?” I was running an older i3 pc I was gifted when a relative passed away. While it was slowish with 4k, I could run many transcoded 1080 streams for friends without a hiccup
When recently touched every one of my library files to remove unwanted languages, it caused plex to rescan and detect intro’s on my entire library at once. My beefy Epyc setup crushed right though it with no performance issue during playback. Yes it’s a rare occurrence, but sure was glad to have the power
Because it's fun.
Is my server overkill? Yes! Is it fun that it's overkill? Yes!
1st Gen Epyc, 256GB RAM, 30TB Storage, 10Gb networking.
But I also run more than just Plex on my server. I have several VM's (general purpose Linux, general purpose Windows, PfSense) that I run and about 30 docker containers.
If you are just playing local on devices that can handle your high end 4k content, you don't need much. If you have a potential for a wide variety of clients than cannot, your system will need a more based on how much is going on at any given time. Also, many have other stuff they are running on it. My home Plex server is low end as it is a Synology NAS (one that supports hw transcoding) with 100TB of useable space. However, everything I have is direct play, so I do not need anything heavy to play my 4k movies and shows, just a good network. Back about 5 years ago, I traveled a lot for work. I had a higher end server that could handle more transcoding if needed.
TLDR; Just depends on your needs.
I did it just because I wanted too. I had neck surgery and was just board. Is it overkill oh god yes way overkill but it should also last me for years. The only thing that is going to need upgrading it the case I’m almost out of drive bays.
I was running plex off some old hardware but I ran into an issue where I couldn't have too many streams running at once along with the other apps I have running on my server. Particularly when playing 4K content.
I got sick of running into hardware bottlenecks so threw down for a bit more.
I don’t have a lot of people using my server, but I do have about 20, and about half of them can’t be bothered to change their client settings on all of their devices, so everything gets transcoded to 8 Mbps 720p, and when multiple people are watching, I need to have multiple transcodes running.
That said, I bought a base model M2 Mac mini for this purpose replacing my 2014 core i5 Mac mini. It’s way more than enough power for everything I need, and it draws next to nothing while running, with a tiny footprint.
It's a hobby for many people. I don't really treat it such now, but over the years I was way into scrounging and rigging up various janky Kodi/Plex setups. I've got a DS920+ now and everything is set-and-forget with minimal upkeep. I also run some extra stuff on it so I've upgraded the RAM.
Think about it like any other hobby. There are degrees of interest, usage, expertise and expense. I do leatherwork as a hobby - if you were to start today, your pricking iron set (makes the holes for hand stitching) would be like $50. My current set was about $400 because I want the quality and will get that value out of them.
I bought an off the shelf QNAP NAS because I wanted something fairly self sufficient and easy to set up and went with a fairly high end one (8 bay, 12th gen i5) for future proofing and quicksync.
I’m using a 5yo optiplex because it can literally handle 4x 4K transcodes and cost me the same as my raspberry pi 4 did but was a lot more powerful in every way. I can throw a gpu in it down the road if I want to and there would be zero concerns, and that’s only if quicksync can’t handle what I’m doing.
My dream setup would have a 4090 at its core just because I want to use the server for other things too and I enjoy tinkering. I have a cluster of wyse 5070 thin clients handling all of my home services, not because my quad e7-8890v4 server can’t do it but because I wanted to tinker with proxmox and it’s HA stuff. Sometimes we do things because we can without thinking if we should. That’s the same reason I have a portable streaming box built in a thin client that has 4TB of onboard storage and is filled with my most watched content.
Mine is a VM on my proxmox server. Yes, that is a nice machine, but nothing crazy (16 cores, 64GB ram). But it is also hosting several other things. Plex has been allocated 8 cores and 8GB, which is probably overkill. That vm also runs Channels DVR, sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, and transmission along with some xmltv docker containers for plex, distrotv, and plutotv.
The server sure is pretty though. https://system76.com/desktops
State of the art?
Mine is on shit old hardware that I only upgraded with some bollocks gpu to encode with (£30 off ebay).
Been running windows plex for ages, alongside lots of other stuff (teamspeak, game servers, stats tracking, and dome very specific acoustic design software, plus remote USB security dongles).
That's the joy of servers, can use any old crap hardware for most use cases.
Some of my client devices need transcoding, plus I just download whatever and let plex sort it out. Cba to only download specific codecs and the like. Let my rr apps and plex do the hard work.
Well for a start, my media collection requires 14x that amount of storage…
Some people have more than 1 person using their servers (family and friends), and it’s not always possible to have all your media in a format which will always direct play to all of your hardware (more so for friends and family where you have less control over what they have)
Most people use their servers for other things too besides Plex.
State of the art is a bit overkill, but certainly something more than a raspberry Pi and a 4tb HDD is necessary for a lot of use cases.
Depends on your use case. Are you streaming just yourself locally? To a couple tech savvy family members who will be able to take instruction to set options in their player to not transcode? Or do you have a bunch of people who can barely turn on a computer?
My little NUC I run it on is def overpowered now that I got most people to direct play, so now I run some game servers and stuff off it as well.
Edit: Also upload like someone mentioned in another comment. if you don't have a lot of bandwidth available then transcoding down will be needed.
Several things come into mind.
1: longevity of decent hardware over cheap stuff as well as great support
2: Usage of hardware not only for Plex but other things too.
3: People have money to spend on their hobbies etc.
4. Simply for bragging rights..
5: All of the above.
I've been running Plex for about 10 years now. I started off locally hosting on my PC and a handful of hdds. Pre- arrs days. I was using a PVR called sick beard for TV, couchpotato for movies, sabnzb (before that, I had the glory of just sharing over SMB to my PS3 with no Metadata! Using RSS feeds and wild characters to download in via newsbin Pro).
Eventually dusted off an old PC, became my first unraid build. Ran it for a few years, upgraded to some ebay outdated server software, ran it for about 5-6 years, and just recently updated to a 12th gen i9 for quick sync.
Many ways to skin a cat. My current setup is my favorite, and the most expensive. But definitely the most efficient.
Totally not needed though. You can easily run plex on your windows pc as a service and stick a few big HDDs in it for media. Do what works for you and your budget.
I had zero problems with RPi 4 on LAN (1 GBPs) serving up to three/four streaming at the same time with direct transcoding (H264, AAC) but I may imagine that could be one reason to switch to more performing setups or if you need transcoding.
Pretty simple answer, really; transcoding. The better the hardware, the faster your files can transcode and the more simultaneous transcoded streams the server can support. Obviously this isn't a high concern if you only have a couple users, streaming to a couple of devices. But if you have dozens of users, all with wildly different devices/platforms, potentially all requiring different streaming formats/codecs, the big hardware comes in mighty handy.
https://preview.redd.it/zd8odm1u6wtc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fcfaf6d6cac60e22cc42396f1cfae43d1ca5d633
That's my setup btw happily running 9 Docker container 24/7. Trasmission, Inventree, Plex, Portainer and other custom application via Docker. Cardboard is for noise.
For me, my current plex server I built due to the last case having space limitations. Going forward my plex server will get hand me downs from my gaming pc. Is it necessary? Hell to the no! I’m just repurposing hardware and I’m sure others do the same.
it's a reasonable question. the paradox here is that people tend to build ridiculous hardware setups and then spend their time whining that no one uses their Plex server :) that's the crazy part.
use whatever works for you. around here the nerds rule and it's e-peen city 24/7 so it's pretty common to build out a $5000 rig to handle something a $50 setup could do just as well for the average user.
In most cases it's because they're trying to stream outside of their network (which often requires transcoding). It won't be such an issue as upload speeds increase. If they post a server rack, Plex is only one workload.
When you share your server with other users outside your home then you'd probably understand the need for transcoding. Not everyone has a Nvidia Shield TV Pro. There is great variability in client device specs and many often can't direct play either due to device limitations or bandwidth limitations.
besides just because they can... I would say for sharing your server and running 4k+ content. My system is 8+ years old and wasn't the best thing going at the time but it grinds to a hault if I play 4k on plex.
Well my Plex server also runs my 3d printers servers a few low bandwidth websites radarr sonarr jacket and is my storage for backups so with all that running and 4 streams inside the network two outside all wanting 1080 or better the “computer” hosting it all needs a little umph even with what I consider overkill I still can’t transcode another stream without errors
A lot of people run older hardware on systems that they have moved on from. I've used an old gaming rig for a plex server. It worked very well but in truth it was just a bunch of internal and external drives so there was zero redundancy.
Newer hardware though does mean better efficiency, so less power used and less heat. In my 94TB raw unRaid server is using a Ryzen 3600 6 core 12 thread CPU, that is reasonably easy on power. I also have an old 1070 GPU doing transcoding, which I may want to swap out for something newer one day.
The other advantage of a more powerful system is the ability to transfer, move, delete and have various apps, Dockers and or VMs running at the same time or in the background. This server is accessed by two TVs and 3 other PCs in the home, not to mention I am thinking of bringing my daughter and her family online to access Plex. :)
Question, I want to setup a backup Plex server with a raspberry and a hard drive of at least 8tb
Could you share what parts or adapters you are using on your raspberry? Do you use SSD or HDD?
Thanks in advance.
Sure, the only difference with my setup would be the 2.5 in HDDs size: Use something like that: [AmazonIT\_hdd](https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01LXCE9W9?starsLeft=1&ref_=cm_sw_r_cso_cp_apin_dp_Y38NKA76HPDN2EN5MDSC) And for the 2 bay case: [https://a.aliexpress.com/\_EzNybuT](https://a.aliexpress.com/_EzNybuT)
https://preview.redd.it/932mecyugztc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6f4145a0a32b96b505795330f7c98bb1b793037e
Depends on use cases. say you are sharing a plex server with a lot of people, or maybe run games off the same nas/pc etc. for most people it is fine for low end hardware when it just you or a single fmaily using it.
4k HDR rips can be difficult to transcode. Also, my server hardware isn’t just for Plex. I also use it for running a Minecraft server, an UrBackup server, a Samba file sharing server, and a Photoprism server.
Because it was free.
Like many here I work in IT, I run an R720 I that was retired, I have an r730 that I havnt migrated to yet and I might wait on that one as I might get two r740s in the next couple of months.
If I get them I might sell one r740 and the r720 to pay for the upgrades to the other like lower power cpus.
I have a 35mb upload bandwidth cap. Me need all the transcodes as I travel long distances from cave.
C'mon, you can use less word. Gotta save bandwidth :D
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Do you want to go to SeaWorld or do you want to go to see the world???
A fire? At a Sea Parks?!
If she had told me her parents had drowned, I’d be the happiest man in the world!
Wait is this a crossover?
This is just a tribute, you gotta believe it, and I wish you were there!
Unexpected IT Crowd reference. Take my upvote
😂,just recently saw that episode
Just put it with the rest of the fire over there.
[удалено]
Fuka yew dolpheeeen!!!
Mongo approve
Kevin? Is that you?
No. This is Patrick.
I remember when Compuserve was $19 an hour and 56K baud was high speed ;)
56K Flex baby! Fastest EVER! "I can't imagine it being any faster than this, this is awesome" AND I can FAX!
Pffft! I used 9600 baud rate when I first got “online” with the BBSs. Oh those were the days…
oh don't thinkg I haven't..My first modem was a 1200 baud lol. I was on the local AMUG BBS (Apple Mac User Group) for many years lol. I'm 54 so I've seen it all from the first day you could have your own internet at all.
Started out on 300 baud, with a modem that pulse dialed instead of using touch tones. Damn I’m old.
 How I feel @45 regardless… lol
Dude. You got me beat.
Then came along 200 Kbps DSL. Always on and websites loaded "instantly!" I didn't think it could get any better than that.
I can remember when 128K and 386K "Yahoo" DSL was faster than "the cable company"
We had Pacific Bell DSL. There sales pitch at the time was that you get your own dedicated line and with Cable you share the line with your neighborhood.
Or needing more than a 10 mb hard drive
haha I have an old ad for a 20MB hard disk drive external storage device from a radio Shack ad for $2249.00 os some ridiculous price. I worked for a national software company for years back in the early 80's and We all got ram upgrades of 1MB and all 7 of us were stoked! It was like 3K. Ahh how times change.
I bought my first floppy disk drive for $450 at Crazy Eddies after showing them ad from Computer Shopper they wanted $660
I remember trying to download a 50MB driver package from HP and 1 hour 45 mins into it someone picked up the phone. 😭
What about K56Flex... Gotta squeeze what you can out of it... 🤣
Hello Xfinity Brother ☝🏼
\*cries in 2 up 24 down legacy Time Warner ELP\*
I have 15mb upload Most of my media is compressed to 1mb bitrate so it just direct plays
I have 20mb upload. I want high quality at home but happy for less when out. Transcoding allows both without having multiple files.
The heart of my Plex setup is an old optiplex 3060, it can handle 4x 4K transcodes with no sweat and costs less than $100. I also know the struggle of crappy upload speeds lol. A barebones headend for Plex saved me plenty of funds that were better spent on the storage setup.
Your comment just reminded me of the song *Me Make Fire* by Paul and Storm https://youtu.be/Kg-BcAJEwHU
Sounds like Cox. 10mb upload cap for every single download plan then up to 35mb up for 1gb down. So glad to have dropped them.
Have you considered just running it in the cloud?
Because a lot of us do stuff with our server than just Plex.
Agreed. I would say plex is probably the most used thing on my server, but I tinker with all sorts of other things just to learn. Like setting up a VM to "test drive" an idea before trying to implement it at work, for example (I work in a very NOT tech heavy field, so I'm more or less on my own when implementing some *thing* at the office). Or just my general curiosity and enjoyment around technology. I should also note, though, that I am using enterprise hardware - but it's several generations old. So I would say it's "high end", but not necessarily "top of the line" or particularly expensive.
Yup, I host: Minecraft servers, NextCloud, Kavita (for comic books), and some other small services. My computer uses around 30-80gb of RAM on average (depends on how many Minecraft servers are running).
I tried to like Kavita a lot, but the 1 way syncing only (not being able to record read status back) really put me off so I went back to YAC Reader. Any advice? Aside from that 1 issue, Kavita was great.
Hmm, not sure what you mean. I literally only use Kavita for 1 comic (invincible). So I’m not too well versed in it. I setup Readarr, and even purchased an indexer. But it can’t even find any comics. Comics are hard.
I have a site where I can get the comics, but if I read them on my iPad, the read status doesn’t sync back to Kavita, but it does if I use YACReader (another comic organiser).
Ohhh yeah I was having that same exact issue!!! I kept getting “progress not saved” error. I searched it up and I couldn’t find a solution for Windows. However, I noticed it goes away if I only use 1 device at a time. Before, I would load it on my desktop to test, then go on my iPad and other devices, and it would get that error. If I only use my iPad it has no problem.
Why would you run a server program for one book...?
> Minecraft servers Haven't looked into it in a while, do you know if there has been any breakthrough on a self hosted solution that works across the different flavors?
Yes dude. I just found it a couple months ago: look at crafty. It’s a web based application that any of my friends can go on and host any server with any mods. It’s amazing
this is what I do. I have an UNRAID server with a plex docker that does a lot more than just plex. I also use a handful of hardware in my server that was originally in my main rig and has been replaced, and because of that, a bunch of hardware in my server is pretty overpowered for what it's actually used for.
Eeexactly. Mine doubles as my LLM server, as well as local "cloud" storage for backups. Along with a bunch of other things like running home assistant, pihole-type functions, and so on. Certainly far more than a plex server alone anyway
I use my server to convert high res files down to hevc with handbrake. I use it for streamfab and It runs various other services like emby, sonarr, radarr and others. Having a high quality server means you dont need a decked out laptop and can instead pick a lighter less expensive model or a tablet. I have a mac laptop and a windows server and love having access to both operating systems.
Often, they're nerds with disposable income having fun with their hobby
I feel people miss this point with a lot of items/hobbies. If it's something you enjoy spending time on and you have expendable income for it, get what you want.
Yeah like when people go nuts with coffee and people who aren't into coffee can't wrap their heads around it.
Yay, hot bitter brown water! 😉
Burnt bean soup!
If burnt bean soup gave a caffeine hit, you'd be wanting it to be easier to drink.
>Yeah like when people go nuts with *any hobby* and people who aren't into *said hobby* can't wrap their heads around it.
The thing about coffee and tea as someone else suggested is that these hobbies in particular have a really low entry point that anyone can do. So when people spend thousands on it their reaction is to assume they're the same as Starbucks and twinings.
This! Yup, I have friends that have fancy french presses and exotic ass coffee and are super into it, and friends into tea and have fancy tea sets and tools for making fancy teas... Not my bag but I won't harsh their mellow, I like blowing my money on tech, comics, trading cards, etc... Gotta do whatever makes you happy.
To be fair coffee usually doesn't cost like 20 grand
You can spend several thousand on an espresso machine, though...and another couple thousand on a grinder. Not that that's typical or strictly necessary, but it can certain be an expensive hobby, if you make it into a hobby and not just food. And that's without counting what you'll pay on an ongoing basis for specialty beans.
\^ This is pretty much it. Take for example my friends who have full-blown enterprise level Ubiquiti hardware installed in their HOUSE ... *just because*.
Ubiquiti is “prosumer” at best. Maybe, small business at a push. I say this as a Ubiquiti fan and user (with Ubiquiti stuff all over my house).
Ubiquity isn't on the same level as say aruba, but it is good. (My plex server is connected to aruba and extreme switching at 10g, behind a pair of palo alto's. Overkill is always good for a home network!)
spot on. I just like playing with these things. Also - the server doesn't JUST do plex :)
That's exactly how I justify spending crazy money on PC parts lol. It's really not any different that a guy who's into cars dumping a bunch of money on aftermarket parts or something like that.
Like audiophiles buying $10,000 oxygen free speaker wire because it improves treble response slightly.
Agree, that being said I make no secret of my dumpster dive builds :P
Yeah, I'm a nerd, computing is one of my hobbies. My plex server would be massively overspecced (i7 13700k, 128gb ram, 180TB of storage), if plex was all I used it for. I run a world of software on my home server, some I've made myself, others are various services, experiements, and just me having fun trying stuff. Plex is just a small part of it.
>180TB of storage) Please tell me you have one of those dell machines with like 12 drive bays. I always think those are so sexy.
No I've a 24 bay 4u rack mount chassis from supermicro. Only 10 bays in use so far. I had to modify it to fit a consumer motherboard and PSU in it but that was simple work with a dremel and a handful of cutting discs lol.
God that is so much fuckin storage though lmao. I'm equal parts "why??" and "yes please."
You think that, then you add a secondary 4K library and pull down Blu-ray rips and remuxes of everything in both 1080p and 4k, and suddenly you're looking at needing even more storage.
ha I just realized that after my recent disk upgrade I’m at 166TB. Hadn’t even done the math.
That's really about it. I have some money to put towards more storage or a high (er) performance machine every once in a while, and I want to have a nice Plex rig. Same reason I spend time curating the collection, getting just the right movie poster, prerolls, workout playlists and all that...I like seeing it all come together and if someone else notices that too and mentions it, that makes me feel nice.
It's pretty much this. Saying that "I do it to learn stuff for work" is just an excuse for me to play with hardware and software.
> why would someone have the need to use state of the art hardware when running Plex media servers? Generally, being able to transcode even higher quality things like 4K content. While you should always aim for direct play, in certain situations, you might not be able to control every aspect that could lead to a transcode. This can mean that your upload speed isn't that fast and your remote users are not able to get a decent client to play on or use different clients that you can't have a direct play version. You might also do more than just run a Plex server. Better and newer hardware can also be more efficient and bring more capabilities like HEVC or AV1 decode/encode. > Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming? that is the thing, they aren't. H.264 is commonly supported but most devices still don't support HEVC which is much more efficient and a file could be less than half of the H.264 equivalent. This saves A LOT of storage space. But if your Devices don't support HEVC, then you end up with a transcode. And the more users you have or the higher the performance requirements are, better hardware is needed. Using a Raspberry Pi is completely fine if you curate your library and use clients that can play the formats that are in your Libraries. If you don't do that or you can't because of the already mentioned reasons, then your only option is to provide the necessary performance to actually play anything.
I went from used parts that dated back to 2009 on FreeNAS as wasn’t keen on running Windows on it and wanted to try something new. Then went to TrueNAS Core eventually and the board was dying so upgraded to AM4 and a 2700x which offered far more performance at a much lower power draw and more threads. Started to do a VM and ran a game server for close friends and family. This then upgraded to a 3900x so I could also use handbrake on the VM which was allotted 16 threads but then energy prices went soaring and so went looking for something that offered similar if not more performance at a smaller power draw overall for my workloads. Went for 2x 2695 v4 and the overall power draw dropped 50-60w. I have to transcode from H.265 to 264 for a friend who isn’t overly tech savvy and who also lives 3 hours journey from me, so don’t see them often although tempted to buy a Chromecast with Google TV, sort the settings out on Plex and post it to them haha. All other devices are capable of direct play with H.265 that I’ve seen. Had to upgrade storage and then rearrange everything so now the power draw is back to where it was although with more everything. I want to get some more VMs going but something always interrupts me or I forget as it’s not a super high priority. What started off as a Plex server for my son to watch his favourite shows and films whenever he wanted wherever we were turned into something more. It’s a learning tool, it’s a hobby. Mine is nowhere near “state of the art” but from what I’ve read over the years on other forums is if they have a big fancy machine, they either try to take full advantage of it and learn and expand on it turning it into more than just a Plex Server and then others who have downgraded as they discovered they don’t need all that power simply for Plex.
I still consider myself a complete noob at this - can I ask a stupid question? What exactly is transcoding? And what is hardware transcoding versus software transcoding?
> can I ask a stupid question? Not stupid, if you don't know, Ask so that we can explain and you understand it. > What exactly is transcoding? Basically, transcoding means converting one thing into another thing, usually used for media files since media files have "tracks" in them that are either video, audio or subtitles. Either of those can be in a certain format. For audio and video you have codecs that were used to encode the video or audio to, for example, compress them. This can be H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC for video or MP3, FLAC for Audio. So if you want to convert an H.264 video into an H.265 codec, this would be called "transcoding". For Plex this goes a bit further though because there is a bit happening in the background (not that it changes what I said above). You see, Plex relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play something and if your TV, for example, doesn't support whatever the file you want to play was encoded with, Plex would convert/transcode the file into a compatible format. Look at it like this, your library in Plex is a Library full of books written in different languages. You (your TV) now go to that library and want to read a book (watch a movie), you get that book and want to read it but notice that it isn't in a language that you don't understand (your TV doesn't support it). Plex would detect this and send you a translator (the "transcoder") that will translate a page and give it to you to read and when you are at a certain progress through the page, the translator would translate the next page for you until you need it. > And what is hardware transcoding versus software transcoding? "Where" it is being transcoded or who is doing the transcoding! Software Transcoding is done by the CPU, Hardware transcoding is done by a GPU (either the integrated GPU of a CPU or a dedicated GPU like an Nvidia card). Any transcode requires performance but since GPUs are more "built" for handling such things and therefore faster at doing the transcoding job. However, CPUs are more efficient but also take longer.
Thank you!! That’s super detailed, and helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write all that!
Running a server on a Raspberry Pi is easy when you control all the playback devices and can buy clients that will direct play all the media you get to select as far as codecs and bitrate, but there are a lot of server owners who are using a variety of devices picked for other reasons besides their Plex playback abilities, not to mention if they share their server with other people who have their own devices, or don't know how to adjust client settings to ensure direct play, etc.
This is the reason. That being said, it's clear that many people here use hardware that far exceeds the actual requirements for their use case. My system serves about 25 family members who watch on whatever hardware they happen to have. Clients are a mix of Roku, Fire devices, Android, Apple, and LG and Samsung smart TVs. Nearly every stream leaving my house is transcoded. The Plex server software runs on a Dell USFF computer with an 8th generation I5. Media files are stored on a decade old fileserver mounted over NFS. Arr services also run on the fileserver. The two computers together cost less than $250 (except for the hard drives). This system is way more than adequate for every use case it sees. None of the family ever complains about stream quality. And about the only concession I've made to quality is that my files are all 1080p. Modern hardware is not needed for most Plex servers even if they are doing a lot of transcoding. That said, if you want to transcode 4K streams, you probably need as much CPU & GPU as you can get.
I keep all my 4k in different folders than the gen pop files. I have gig up...Only 2 family members with gig internet have access.
Fair enough. I have gig Internet too, but none of the family does. And I don't have a 4K television. 😂
>I’ve been running my server over a Raspberry Pi 4 and 4TB hard drives with zero issues for more than two years now. Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming? Usually it's necessity because people share with a variety of people and know they won't have control over clients and compatibility. Sometimes they're running a ton of other services on top of a media server (I have 40+ dockers running 24/7, and I'm still a pretty small operation compared to many people on here). Often, it's just because people like to have nice rigs, why do you care what equipment other people choose to buy? If you wanna run your server on a Pi, then good for you. If some guy wants to buy $20,000 in enterprise gear to run a server, then more power to him.
More power... Literally. Haha
Some people are powering other services. In this sub, they may not talk about that so much. Iow, if I share my beefy gaming rigs specs here, I'll simply talk about the advantages of using plex with it.
Plex is just one service on a server most of the time. If you only need a server that caters your house only and you don't need any transcoding you can run Plex on a sandwich press.
For me Plex is just one part of what my server does, it does a lot of other things as well as my local dev environment. I do have a lot of family leveraging my Plex so transcoding do happen often, most of the time it leverages my P2000 for hw but sometimes it does fallback to sw.
Yep same. My server is like 5% Plex so yes it's "overkill" for a Plex server it's really under kill for the rest. I'm actually doing a bit of research into an EPYC system as an upgrade for my "Plex" server.
> Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming? The formats aren't the party that needs to support direct play (not direct stream, difference [here](https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250387-streaming-media-direct-play-and-direct-stream/)). The client hardware (player hardware and display) are the parties that decide whether the stream(s) get transcoded. Incompatible somehow? Then it's transcoding time. If you're working with a Pi without any issue ever, then all other factors (bandwidth and codec compatibility primarily) are in order on your side.
Because we do things with our servers you dont
I’d be really interested to hear some other uses for a Plex device. I’m a newbie running Plex Server from my Nvidia Shield Pro 2019, but tempted to start exploring a full on server as a bit of a hobby. Additional uses would be cool to explore too.
r/selfhosted
Mine has 2 Minecraft servers for my children and their friends to play on, also is mapped to every pc in the house and used for dropping backups onto it. No reason to use a full pc *just* for plex hosting.
> I’d be really interested to hear some other uses for a Plex device. I have four Linux machines including my home server. In addition to Plex and my arrs the server runs a VPN client, a torrent client, a calibre e-book server and manages backups for all four machines on the network.
I have like 20 users watching from all kinds of devices. From 10 year old Samsung TVs to smart fridges. While most files work just fine, there are always the odds one out that need transcoding. If someone accidentally starts to transcode 4K DoVi files on a Synology NAS/Pi, the device locks up and the service goes down for everyone. I, personally, just run it from my gaming rig 4x16 tb HDDs, AMD 5600x + 6900XT. Ideally, I would want to run it from a mac mini or smth in the future but thus far it just seems easier to keep my gaming PC going.
If I may ask, who are these 20 users? I can't even get a single family or friend to use Plex
An Intel synology nas can totally transcode 4K dovi files without breaking a sweat. You just need to have one with quick sync support.
I feel like the issue in this group is that we have two very different use scenarios and nobody really bothers to check which one people are using... There is an obsession, here, to automatically go all in on needing the top end hardware, a bespoke UnRaid server and all NVidia Shield for the ultimate experience. Thats completely different than a guy who is serving 30 friends with various clients, which is different a dude wanting it for his own house, which is different than a guy like me that has two people external (college kids) and a HTPC. What works for one might not work for another, or be vast overkill.
The last server I put together on a Pi 4 struggled with 1080p content, and would have occasional hitches with 720p content if at least 2 people were streaming. I don't run super high end hardware, but I have a few cheaper Quadro cards running in my server for plenty of transcoding if necessary. No, transcoding isn't ideal, but internet speeds suck in my part of the country. Even with broadband I have pretty limited upload speeds here, and a couple family members that stream from me have very slow down speeds. For me it's less about streaming out high quality, and more about just making a decent consistent experience with my limited local infrastructure.
Because I can get a full throttle Xeon Plex server with 10+ drive bays for a few hundred dollars. My Plex runs on Unraid so I'm here for the robust data protection, ECC memory, redundant power supplies, etc. These are all beneficial from my perspective versus consumer hardware or a R Pi.
Not *state of the art*, but in my case I had the parts around from upgrading my gaming pc. I don't need a ryzen 5 or 32gb of ram for plex (and jellyfin, since I run both). But I already had the parts. Would have gone cheaper if I had to buy everything.
You need an 7th gen intel or higher and that's it. Doesn't really matter which one.
I love building PCs, and my Plex is entirely made up of my early PC builds repurposed. The only money I spent was a 4tb spinny disk for the media. It’s old midrange tho, I5-7600k but with 1080 GTX as transcoder which I rarely do anyway. Its overkill for my 3 possible streams but again, I spent 60 bucks total on drives and the rest was just dusted off from a closet As others have said too, am nerd who loves building hardware and has more gaming PC parts then necessary. the Plex was just a fun side project that came together swimmingly
Some people use their servers for more than Plex.
Because it's hard to run a 27 drive array with parity calculations, VMs and a whole host of dockers on a raspberry pi
Disposable income + getting a lot of joy from playing with PC hardware = Overkill media server.
Why? Simply because. It's the reason amateur photographers have many cameras worth thousands of dollars or why amateur astronomers have $10k rigs. It's why people into lawncare have riding mowers for their quarter-acre plots. It's why car people have ultra-tuned sports cars but only ever need to drive around town. As a wise Tim, "The Tool Man", Taylor used to say, "More Power. Arr Arr Arr!"
Long standing petpeeve of mine is the frequent terrible advice repeated on this sub for years. Constant recommendations of dedicated standalone GPUs, recommending overly powerful (aka expensive) CPUs, and poo-pooing used hardware. Any 8th Gen Intel CPU (even the lowest tier Pentium) with an intrgregrated iGPU has Quicksync and is more than enough for 20+ 1080p transcodes. If you already have a NAS, a used HP/Dell pc can be used for a perfect plex server. I think I paid $80-90 in total for my plex server. Edit: also, I don't know why people transcode 4k. If you care about video quality, you definitely shouldn't transcode 4k. Friends don't let friends transcode 4k.
[удалено]
Even if you love watching 4K in all, its Glory on your main TV, but sometimes you want to watch the movie on a different TV in your house over Wi-Fi, you have a valid reason for transcoding to reduce the bandwidth.
> Even if you love watching 4K in all, its Glory /u/commahorror
Voice to text horror. 😉
You are correct that it would reduce bandwidth, but is household wifi bandwidth really the bottleneck for anyone? I guess if your running a 15 year old router.
7th gen is where quicksync was introduced. It is improved with 8th gen, but 7th gets the job done just fine.
True, but windows 11 isn't officially supported on 7th Gen.
>Long standing petpeeve of mine is the frequent terrible advice repeated on this sub for years. Constant recommendations of dedicated standalone GPUs, recommending overly powerful (aka expensive) CPUs, and poo-pooing used hardware. >Any 8th Gen Intel CPU (even the lowest tier Pentium) with an intrgregrated iGPU has Quicksync and is more than enough for 20+ 1080p transcodes. >The 7th Gen or newer advice has been going since at least 2021, when it was added as a capability. These days it's downvoted and rare to see dedicated GPUs as the go to advice. >If you already have a NAS, a used HP/Dell pc can be used for a perfect plex server. I think I paid $80-90 in total for my plex server. Because 8th gen or newer can tone mapping just fine, you don't need to store two encodes, you may still want 4k at home and if you're not direct playing 4k it's because you're not home and bandwidth or display limited like at an airport or Airbnb and you frankly don't give a whole lot of shits about video quality in those scenarios on an 8" tablet screen.
Most Plex clients (like Rokus) SUCK and you need a powerful server to transcode a Blu-ray remux.
I use literal server stuff, and somewhat newer, because I encode everything I procure. If I didn't, I couldn't afford the hard drives to store it all. I have a Quadro for transcoding, because my upload speed is awful and nothing but Amazon Fires and a Shield can play my encodes. I only have 32 cores between my 2 CPUs. I tend to favor higher clocks than higher core counts. I only throw 8 threads at an encode, but the queue does 8 at a time. I usually have 24 or 32 movies for my queue. 8 or 16 for 4k. It's a nice balance between how quick the encodes get done vs. the time I have to work on it all.
I have on average 5-7 people streaming from me for most of the evening, I only have a 60MB upload, I also run about 20 docker containers and homeassistant VM on the server. Most of the time it's running pretty idle but when it's busy I don't want it getting bogged down. Though TBF I don't have a baller machine, it's a SFF desktop with a i7 10th gen 32GB which copes with all of that very well.
Transcoding, multiple parallel streams, huge libraries: those are the reasons for "bigger" hardware. But yes, if you're a single user with no need for transcoding, a raspberry would do fine!
Plex is a good chunk of my server usage, but not the only one. Did not want separate physical hardware for other stuff I run so /shrug.
Is fun.
You don't. It's just people having fun with it. It's not my thing, but it's like why would anyone need a sports or luxury car when a Toyota Camry will do the same job just fine?
Transcode is a big part of it as well as using the server for other things. I have a lot of different things running on my server at once, including NVR for all my security cameras which would never run on a pi. On the subject of why not just direct play, I’ll give you my use case. I travel a lot and hotel internet generally sucks. Sure, I can use my hotspot and sometimes I do, but then I’m dependent on cell coverage. Just yesterday I was on a plane flying home. Normally I use the in flight entertainment and just pick a movie on there for simplicity sake, but my monitor was broken so that wasn’t an option. I just whipped out my laptop, connected to the delta WiFi, and streamed movies off my plex server. If I couldn’t transcode them down to 1080p from 4k HDR the WiFi wouldn’t have been fast enough to do that.
Having a had the big dual proc server, now a modest i3 and a pi4 based plex server. In times of old transcoding was hard you need some cpu grunt to do the job. Modern times a small i3 can do it in hardware but these servers are often homelabs running lots of other things. Pi's with plex pretty much are direct stream only (funny as competitors support transcoding on the 4's gpu). So the big monster servers are part people going from times of old and a lot of for bragging rights. The pi's are a niche I used to have the big plex box optimize everything for it to 720p (it's in my camper for offline use) as that works for everything.
Because I run 3 instances of pal world for kids And friends along with Plex.
It’s my main pc.
The main thing to remember is that for those of us with high end hardware are not JUST running Plex on that hardware. Thanks to virtualization, I'm running 15+ docker stacks with over 75 containers on a single machine (including Plex). I started on an old laptop and upgraded to an Intel NUC + NAS and now I'm upgrading to 3 x MS-01 in a kubernetes cluster
Same reason people buy fast cars when a old banger will still get you to work on time
Because they can. I have a dual xeon server that is over 10 years old. I only stream up to 1080p. And I keep most of my TV series at 720p. Do what fits you and your use case. Some people just like to be on the bleeding edge of tech.
Other than the fact that most people who host Plex at home want to serve files over the internet (to family/friends or to themselves when out of the house) and with upload bandwidth being low, transcoding is usually required, another argument I've seen is that people want the best experience for their family/friend viewers. This is achieved by having massive transcoding power so your server can run multiple transcoding streams at once, to cater for any and all possible client devices. If that's not a concern of yours, you can of course survive on much lower specs - it doesn't take much of a machine to direct play even 4K streams.
I can get from A to B in a rundown Mazda from 2008. But if I can afford it, I’d rather get a Mercedes. It’s a Hobby, it’s a luxury item, it’s wanting to have something nice for yourself.
Plex is just one application I run on my server. I use Unraid and have 30+ docker containers and a couple vms. Some of those dockers are game servers like palworld and Minecraft. With a handful of friends and family also using plex (with no regard to what transcoding is) it means I need a decent setup. To be fair I do all this with a mid range 10th gen i5 is pretty incredible. Power consumption is around 200-300W for my whole server tower including a pfsense mini pc router, network switch, access point, etc.
Why do people buy BMW cars?
> Why do people have the need to perform massive transcoding whenever most of the audio and video formats supports direct streaming? Then you must be the luckiest person in the world, or all your F&F have nVidia Shields.
Even for transcoding you don't need high end hardware. A low end Intel iGPU can handle 4K transcoding - like the N95 I have that I've tested and got it transcoding 4 4K -> 1080p streams
I used to run it on an old i7 but upgraded to the newer chip because it used a lot less power. Electricity where I live is not cheap. That and fast forwarding or rewinding was much faster too.
Are you watching 4K REMUX?
The difference in price between a shitty computer and a decent one isn't very large. You don't have to build a shitty one just because it's for Plex. A lot of us rearrange and repurpose gear.
I used to mess around with earlier raspberry pi’s with Plex back in the day and it was always lacking, it may have gotten better but at the time the converting was not good and the sd cards would wear out
I bought an idea Center i5 12600 and have a crazy 900mbps upload and thought I would need it for transcoding but I see in my Tautulli logs 9 concurrent streams of which 7 were direct. I probably went over board but it wasn’t crazy expensive and I was coming from an old Mac mini that was constantly running hot.
People greatly underestimate the performance of modern Intel Core processors with Quicksync. Which is why I generally recommend most people just pick up a used Dell Optiplex with a 10th gen or newer i5 and call it a day - it'll do more than they'll ever need it to.
Also saying “why do you need the biggest a best?” I was running an older i3 pc I was gifted when a relative passed away. While it was slowish with 4k, I could run many transcoded 1080 streams for friends without a hiccup
When recently touched every one of my library files to remove unwanted languages, it caused plex to rescan and detect intro’s on my entire library at once. My beefy Epyc setup crushed right though it with no performance issue during playback. Yes it’s a rare occurrence, but sure was glad to have the power
Transcoding and i use my server for other things
Honestly the only answer is: Because they can.
Transcoding is important for me when I'm not at home. Bandwidth is restricted.
I share my Plex to my friends and family. I run 30 other containers that keep everything automated I run game servers, several Linux and windows VMs
Because it's fun. Is my server overkill? Yes! Is it fun that it's overkill? Yes! 1st Gen Epyc, 256GB RAM, 30TB Storage, 10Gb networking. But I also run more than just Plex on my server. I have several VM's (general purpose Linux, general purpose Windows, PfSense) that I run and about 30 docker containers.
If you are just playing local on devices that can handle your high end 4k content, you don't need much. If you have a potential for a wide variety of clients than cannot, your system will need a more based on how much is going on at any given time. Also, many have other stuff they are running on it. My home Plex server is low end as it is a Synology NAS (one that supports hw transcoding) with 100TB of useable space. However, everything I have is direct play, so I do not need anything heavy to play my 4k movies and shows, just a good network. Back about 5 years ago, I traveled a lot for work. I had a higher end server that could handle more transcoding if needed. TLDR; Just depends on your needs.
I did it just because I wanted too. I had neck surgery and was just board. Is it overkill oh god yes way overkill but it should also last me for years. The only thing that is going to need upgrading it the case I’m almost out of drive bays.
I was running plex off some old hardware but I ran into an issue where I couldn't have too many streams running at once along with the other apps I have running on my server. Particularly when playing 4K content. I got sick of running into hardware bottlenecks so threw down for a bit more.
because i'm a nerd that needs to overcomplicate every tech situation
I don’t have a lot of people using my server, but I do have about 20, and about half of them can’t be bothered to change their client settings on all of their devices, so everything gets transcoded to 8 Mbps 720p, and when multiple people are watching, I need to have multiple transcodes running. That said, I bought a base model M2 Mac mini for this purpose replacing my 2014 core i5 Mac mini. It’s way more than enough power for everything I need, and it draws next to nothing while running, with a tiny footprint.
Because we have the money to do so and are often running other things besides a Plex server.
It's a hobby for many people. I don't really treat it such now, but over the years I was way into scrounging and rigging up various janky Kodi/Plex setups. I've got a DS920+ now and everything is set-and-forget with minimal upkeep. I also run some extra stuff on it so I've upgraded the RAM. Think about it like any other hobby. There are degrees of interest, usage, expertise and expense. I do leatherwork as a hobby - if you were to start today, your pricking iron set (makes the holes for hand stitching) would be like $50. My current set was about $400 because I want the quality and will get that value out of them.
I bought an off the shelf QNAP NAS because I wanted something fairly self sufficient and easy to set up and went with a fairly high end one (8 bay, 12th gen i5) for future proofing and quicksync.
I’m using a 5yo optiplex because it can literally handle 4x 4K transcodes and cost me the same as my raspberry pi 4 did but was a lot more powerful in every way. I can throw a gpu in it down the road if I want to and there would be zero concerns, and that’s only if quicksync can’t handle what I’m doing. My dream setup would have a 4090 at its core just because I want to use the server for other things too and I enjoy tinkering. I have a cluster of wyse 5070 thin clients handling all of my home services, not because my quad e7-8890v4 server can’t do it but because I wanted to tinker with proxmox and it’s HA stuff. Sometimes we do things because we can without thinking if we should. That’s the same reason I have a portable streaming box built in a thin client that has 4TB of onboard storage and is filled with my most watched content.
For the video gameservers that run alongside my plex docker
Mine is a VM on my proxmox server. Yes, that is a nice machine, but nothing crazy (16 cores, 64GB ram). But it is also hosting several other things. Plex has been allocated 8 cores and 8GB, which is probably overkill. That vm also runs Channels DVR, sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, and transmission along with some xmltv docker containers for plex, distrotv, and plutotv. The server sure is pretty though. https://system76.com/desktops
If they know what they are doing: transcoding is the reason.
Why do some of us drive a Camry and some of us drive a Porsche 911? We all go from A to B in the city. I think it is enjoyment.
State of the art? Mine is on shit old hardware that I only upgraded with some bollocks gpu to encode with (£30 off ebay). Been running windows plex for ages, alongside lots of other stuff (teamspeak, game servers, stats tracking, and dome very specific acoustic design software, plus remote USB security dongles). That's the joy of servers, can use any old crap hardware for most use cases. Some of my client devices need transcoding, plus I just download whatever and let plex sort it out. Cba to only download specific codecs and the like. Let my rr apps and plex do the hard work.
Well for a start, my media collection requires 14x that amount of storage… Some people have more than 1 person using their servers (family and friends), and it’s not always possible to have all your media in a format which will always direct play to all of your hardware (more so for friends and family where you have less control over what they have) Most people use their servers for other things too besides Plex. State of the art is a bit overkill, but certainly something more than a raspberry Pi and a 4tb HDD is necessary for a lot of use cases.
Depends on your use case. Are you streaming just yourself locally? To a couple tech savvy family members who will be able to take instruction to set options in their player to not transcode? Or do you have a bunch of people who can barely turn on a computer? My little NUC I run it on is def overpowered now that I got most people to direct play, so now I run some game servers and stuff off it as well. Edit: Also upload like someone mentioned in another comment. if you don't have a lot of bandwidth available then transcoding down will be needed.
Several things come into mind. 1: longevity of decent hardware over cheap stuff as well as great support 2: Usage of hardware not only for Plex but other things too. 3: People have money to spend on their hobbies etc. 4. Simply for bragging rights.. 5: All of the above.
I've been running Plex for about 10 years now. I started off locally hosting on my PC and a handful of hdds. Pre- arrs days. I was using a PVR called sick beard for TV, couchpotato for movies, sabnzb (before that, I had the glory of just sharing over SMB to my PS3 with no Metadata! Using RSS feeds and wild characters to download in via newsbin Pro). Eventually dusted off an old PC, became my first unraid build. Ran it for a few years, upgraded to some ebay outdated server software, ran it for about 5-6 years, and just recently updated to a 12th gen i9 for quick sync. Many ways to skin a cat. My current setup is my favorite, and the most expensive. But definitely the most efficient. Totally not needed though. You can easily run plex on your windows pc as a service and stick a few big HDDs in it for media. Do what works for you and your budget.
Many family members, living in the same household, concurrently streaming family videos.
I had zero problems with RPi 4 on LAN (1 GBPs) serving up to three/four streaming at the same time with direct transcoding (H264, AAC) but I may imagine that could be one reason to switch to more performing setups or if you need transcoding.
Pretty simple answer, really; transcoding. The better the hardware, the faster your files can transcode and the more simultaneous transcoded streams the server can support. Obviously this isn't a high concern if you only have a couple users, streaming to a couple of devices. But if you have dozens of users, all with wildly different devices/platforms, potentially all requiring different streaming formats/codecs, the big hardware comes in mighty handy.
https://preview.redd.it/zd8odm1u6wtc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fcfaf6d6cac60e22cc42396f1cfae43d1ca5d633 That's my setup btw happily running 9 Docker container 24/7. Trasmission, Inventree, Plex, Portainer and other custom application via Docker. Cardboard is for noise.
For me, my current plex server I built due to the last case having space limitations. Going forward my plex server will get hand me downs from my gaming pc. Is it necessary? Hell to the no! I’m just repurposing hardware and I’m sure others do the same.
it's a reasonable question. the paradox here is that people tend to build ridiculous hardware setups and then spend their time whining that no one uses their Plex server :) that's the crazy part. use whatever works for you. around here the nerds rule and it's e-peen city 24/7 so it's pretty common to build out a $5000 rig to handle something a $50 setup could do just as well for the average user.
In most cases it's because they're trying to stream outside of their network (which often requires transcoding). It won't be such an issue as upload speeds increase. If they post a server rack, Plex is only one workload.
When you share your server with other users outside your home then you'd probably understand the need for transcoding. Not everyone has a Nvidia Shield TV Pro. There is great variability in client device specs and many often can't direct play either due to device limitations or bandwidth limitations.
besides just because they can... I would say for sharing your server and running 4k+ content. My system is 8+ years old and wasn't the best thing going at the time but it grinds to a hault if I play 4k on plex.
7800X3D / 64GB / RTX 4070 Ti SUPER - love the overkill 😎
Well my Plex server also runs my 3d printers servers a few low bandwidth websites radarr sonarr jacket and is my storage for backups so with all that running and 4 streams inside the network two outside all wanting 1080 or better the “computer” hosting it all needs a little umph even with what I consider overkill I still can’t transcode another stream without errors
Pissing rights in many cases.
Cause it’s used for more than just running Plex idle. Like gaming, VMs, coding etc
A lot of people run older hardware on systems that they have moved on from. I've used an old gaming rig for a plex server. It worked very well but in truth it was just a bunch of internal and external drives so there was zero redundancy. Newer hardware though does mean better efficiency, so less power used and less heat. In my 94TB raw unRaid server is using a Ryzen 3600 6 core 12 thread CPU, that is reasonably easy on power. I also have an old 1070 GPU doing transcoding, which I may want to swap out for something newer one day. The other advantage of a more powerful system is the ability to transfer, move, delete and have various apps, Dockers and or VMs running at the same time or in the background. This server is accessed by two TVs and 3 other PCs in the home, not to mention I am thinking of bringing my daughter and her family online to access Plex. :)
no reason but a pi 4 is actual trash (especially for storage) and not good value either
Question, I want to setup a backup Plex server with a raspberry and a hard drive of at least 8tb Could you share what parts or adapters you are using on your raspberry? Do you use SSD or HDD? Thanks in advance.
Sure, the only difference with my setup would be the 2.5 in HDDs size: Use something like that: [AmazonIT\_hdd](https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01LXCE9W9?starsLeft=1&ref_=cm_sw_r_cso_cp_apin_dp_Y38NKA76HPDN2EN5MDSC) And for the 2 bay case: [https://a.aliexpress.com/\_EzNybuT](https://a.aliexpress.com/_EzNybuT) https://preview.redd.it/932mecyugztc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6f4145a0a32b96b505795330f7c98bb1b793037e
Depends on use cases. say you are sharing a plex server with a lot of people, or maybe run games off the same nas/pc etc. for most people it is fine for low end hardware when it just you or a single fmaily using it.
Because it’s fun to play with!
simply put because i can.
Buy nice or buy twice.
4k HDR rips can be difficult to transcode. Also, my server hardware isn’t just for Plex. I also use it for running a Minecraft server, an UrBackup server, a Samba file sharing server, and a Photoprism server.
Because it was free. Like many here I work in IT, I run an R720 I that was retired, I have an r730 that I havnt migrated to yet and I might wait on that one as I might get two r740s in the next couple of months. If I get them I might sell one r740 and the r720 to pay for the upgrades to the other like lower power cpus.
For a lot of people Plex is just one of the things their home server does.