Maybe I’m being lazy, I did a quick search and I cannot see the answer I’m looking for.
I currently use plex on a little cheep slow freenas box and have now bought a dual xeon server with 16Gb of EEC ram as an upgrade, considering another 16 it’s so cheep!
I can get almost any OS I like for it and would like to know which flavour of software would be the best supported, ie the majority use it or most of the Devs use it obviously it would need to be compatible with twin Xeons but I’m sure most are.
Cost is not a consideration I work for a large enough company to get a licence gratis.
I’m sure plenty of people have mixed opinions but my priority is a close to bug free system utilising the full transcoding potential of the Xeons.
The one you are the most familiar with.
Personally, I use Windows 7.
It will be headless. I have freenas and w7 at home, we use VM windows server edition at work as well as Ubuntu and I have a MacBook so I’m happy with most just figured since it was dedicated to plex might as well pick the best supported OS…
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Starbetrayer has it nailed. Headless or not, the system you know best is the best for you.
I currently use Windows 7 on mine, but I have tried the Linux version as well, I did have some issues with the Linux version (mostly permissions, but other stuff too), however, the big game changer for me was - I run my Plex server headless, so I need to access it sometimes to add media, change settings, etc.. Remote Desktop makes this very easy, especially when I am not at home. Although I would rather run a Linux server, the remote desktop and no permissions make Windows a great option for me. One note though, If you want to use remote desktop, you have to have 7 Pro or higher.
I'm using Linux Ubuntu for the server which runs on Hyper-V. There are many tutorials on how to install Plex which you can follow first.
Samba makes me easily add TV shows and movies although I should look into that because it can easily be automated.
Linux for the plex server and plex home theatre. On all my laptops I run Linux and only my main pc is running windows 7. But soon i will change that too, and run windows7 only virtually if i have to. For someone who can handle Linux, I would suggest it prior to windows. Less expensive, more possibilities and you dont have to restart for every update you make.
At the end its as the first comment to your post says. Its up to you, no os is better or less for plex.
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I’ve been running my Plex Media Server on Windows 10 (Tech Preview) for months and haven’t had any issues.
PMS is running on my NAS, never had a problem.
PHT is running as openELEC + PHT fork on my NUC.
Pretty satisfied.
I’ve only run it on Mac OS X and FreeNAS. My OS X experience was heads above the FreeNAS experience because the FreeNAS plugin was alway several versions behind the current version. Another strike against FreeNAS is that I could not take advance of being a PlexPass holder because I was at the mercy of the plugin developer to get provide Plex, and they only provided the publicly available version.
I cannot speak to the Windows or Linux versions as I have not run them, but I would think that Windows would be less problematic codec-wise.
Based on my experience and conjecture, I’d go with OS X.
@TheeGooch said:
My OS X experience was heads above the FreeNAS experience because the FreeNAS plugin was alway several versions behind the current version. Another strike against FreeNAS is that I could not take advance of being a PlexPass holder because I was at the mercy of the plugin developer to get provide Plex, and they only provided the publicly available version.
The solution is to not use the plug-in in FreeNAS. You just make a standard jail then install PMS in it like one would install any other FreeBSD software. This not only makes the PlexPass version available but makes updating quick and flawless. It’s really not much work to do it this way.
Not a strike against FreeNAS at all. They hate the plug-ins because people are never satisfied and maintaining them is a distraction from their core focus which is making an amazing NAS (which they do). Every release that they don’t just abandon the plug-ins entirely and force users to do things the right way on their own is a miracle (but unfortunately just continues to encourage bad behavior).
I have been running headless 64bit CentOS 6.5 in a dedicated ESXi VM without problems. I set up 1TB of storage plus CIFS for media backups. Have been running like this for a year without problems. I upgrade the software with rpm using the PlexPass version.
I have it running on my windows 10 box but I’ve been trying to get it running on my OmniOS (with Napp-IT on top) without success. I may transfer the content of my NAS onto a portable HD and then re-image the NAS with something that is easier and better supported.
I have mine running on a headless Windows 10 box. Like @fcomstoc mentioned, the remote desktop option is nice. I usually log into my server when I want to transcode my blu-ray rips into a better format so I direct play as much of my media as possible. Besides that, I am not logged into my server, but Plex runs without any issues.
I had some issues in the linux version, I dont know why, but was slower than windows (is not a good server, but works great with win7).
@ALX1S said:
I had some issues in the linux version, I dont know why, but was slower than windows (is not a good server, but works great with win7).
That could be because of hardware issues and nothing to do with Plex. There is much crappy hardware out there that might as well be Windows-only. Lack of decent documentation or support from the mfr results in crappy (or non-existent) Linux drivers.
For a proper non-Windows experience, you want to pick out hardware with the target OS in-mind.
@sremick said:
That could be because of hardware issues and nothing to do with Plex.
I run CentOS 7 bare metal with Plex installed. Here is my HW:
Supermicro MB
Dual 6 core Xeon v3 2.9Ghz (on the supported list from Supermicro)
64GB Hynix memory (it’s on the supported RAM list from Supermicro)
2x Samsung TLC drives striped for OS
4x Samsung PM SLC drives @ 240 GB in raid10 ( only for /Library/Application\ Support and /plexmediaserver) on the internal 2116 LSI HBA.
LSI 9211-24i HBA (IT-mode) with 24 x HUS726040ALE610 drives (for /home)
10Gbit Mellanox card attached to a Cisco switch.
I modprobed the kernel to only include the needed LKM’s and only running Plex as non-essential PID.
I still have to say that Windows 7 outperforms Linux when running Plex, even when I have Windows 7 as a guest in ESXI on the same configuration.
Maybe it’s python (bootstrap.py) or maybe somthing else, not sure. Would be great to see.
@yows said:
I run CentOS 7 bare metal with Plex installed. Here is my HW:
Supermicro MB
Dual 6 core Xeon v3 2.9Ghz (on the supported list from Supermicro)
64GB Hynix memory (it’s on the supported RAM list from Supermicro)
2x Samsung TLC drives striped for OS
4x Samsung PM SLC drives @ 240 GB in raid10 ( only for /Library/Application\ Support and /plexmediaserver) on the internal 2116 LSI HBA.
LSI 9211-24i HBA (IT-mode) with 24 x HUS726040ALE610 drives (for /home)
10Gbit Mellanox card attached to a Cisco switch.
Was this supposed to be a joke?
If not, this config is ridiculous… I just googled some of this gear. You’re running like $5,000+ worth of gear for Plex?
I am sure that is a little beyond what most reading this were planning on getting into.
Thinking about moving my server side to a Linux box. Been running a mid-2010 Mac mini for both server and main client since new, with ~8TB of UBS drives hanging off it at this point. Works quite well most of the time. Internal drive was upgraded to SSD a while back, but main limitations are USB 2 only and C2D processor. It’s configured on wired Gb ethernet, and I find I can stream up to full blu-ray rips well enough to both wired and wireless clients. It’s pretty much maxed out when transcoding those for lesser clients though. On the download side verify / repair / extract is pretty slow, often taking longer than the download (peaks at ~18MB/s). There is also no backup or RAID protection on media, which is not a great idea. Would take a long time to rebuild.
I’m pretty comfortable with Linux (administer a small cluster at work), so here was what I was thinking. I have a couple of retired Dell Precision T-3500 with dual Xeons hanging around. They are still only USB2/FW but also have eSata and RAID. So thinking about installing RHEL 5.8 64 bit (what I’m used to) with Plex server, and attaching an external eSATA box with RAID5, maybe 6x2TB for 10TB available? Server would go in network closet and be administered headless with VNC (also what I’m used to). Not sure if there is a linux equivalent to MakeMKV, so might have to continue to do rips from the Mini over ethernet? Also not sure about usenet, but I assume there is a similar path on Linux for sabnzbd and far handling.
Any experience on how that might perform?
I’ve been using MakeMKV on Debian and it has yet to fail one rip - it is a thirty (30) day trial though.
