On a number of posts, there has been chatter about different Plex Media Server setups.
Currently, there is Desktop, Laptop, Mac, NAS, Cloud and Router setup for making a Plex Media Server.
I wanted to know from anyone, which is the best overall? Is the Desktop the best or the rest?
I’m guessing Desktop would be the best because of the ease of CPU power that can come from one. Most, not all NAS devices, have a ARM processor and cannot hold the demands people throw at Plex. Whether is acquiring metadata or transcoding, Desktops whether built custom or not seem to make the process of Plex better. Am I wrong?
Feedback on this would be welcome.
Currently, I run a Seagate Personal Cloud and because of the ARM processor it houses, I cannot add music and build a music library without the device crashing. I have thousands of songs I would like to add, but the processor is not strong enough. I am considering a change of server.
What’s the best flavor of ice cream? How long is a piece of string?
There is no “best overall” as varying solutions cater to varying needs, priorities, budgets, and skill levels.
Plex is a tool, not a singular solution. The overall picture of how the Plex cog fits into the ultimate solution will be different from person to person.
My solution is a super-powerful singular NAS that handles the duties of both NAS and PMS on the same box.
@sremick said:
What’s the best flavor of ice cream? How long is a piece of string?
There is no “best overall” as varying solutions cater to varying needs, priorities, budgets, and skill levels.
Plex is a tool, not a singular solution. The overall picture of how the Plex cog fits into the ultimate solution will be different from person to person.
My solution is a super-powerful singular NAS that handles the duties of both NAS and PMS on the same box.
I understand that. Plex does explain this, but I wanted user’s preferences on this. I want something powerful enough to playback content and add a large music library.
What’s your technical skill level? What’s your budget? How many clients simultaneously? What types of clients? How much storage needed now and projected into the future? Etc etc etc.
Even with what you’re asking, you’re not providing enough information for someone to answer you.
@SanchezHouse, you’re going to find a wide range of opinions on this – which it seems is exactly what you’re after. To help give some direction to the community to better assist you, providing the details that @sremick asked for would be helpful as there really is no one size fits all approach. We wouldn’t want to recommend something to you that is overkill on cost and performance, or something that is not going to meet your needs and turns out to be a pain point.
Let’s start with how many people do you expect to watch simultaneously and what devices will they be using?
My solution is an i7 laptop with 256gig ssd connected cat6 to a gigabit lan to a Nitehawk router.
(i7 laptops can be had at reasonable prices and is quiet and uses less power than a desktop type PC)
My library is over 45tb all USB connected (And Growing)
My media is encoded h.264(H.265 for 4K)/mp4/AC3 to minimize the number of transcodes that will be needed or anticipated.
With all that being said, I can have 4-7 remote users transcoding concurrently, depending on the source media. Even with that running I can still access my media locally on a few devices concurrently, as on my internal network most media will direct play. I can even play 4K simultaneously if encoded to direct play.
Those are the sort of requirements and usage needs you need to determine for yourself in order to select what is the best configuration for you.
I know some Plex employees have pretty beefy systems while others have more modest setups. I’m happy to share mine, which lands a bit on the modest side (at least in terms of CPU). You be the judge, as I’ve come to learn that one person’s modest approach is another person’s high end!
I use a late-2013 quad-core i5 iMac for my PMS hard-wired to the router. Internal drives are 128GB SSD + 3TB. I decided to focus spending on a new OLED TV rather than upgrade my PMS. Media is stored on a 4-bay NAS (WD My Cloud EX4100) using 4x4TB WD Red drives, also hard-wired to the router. For the purposes of a local backup I use 4x4TB WD MyBook external USB3 drives. I also have an off-site backup in the cloud with Backblaze where I store all our personal files, photos, videos, and more recently all the media from my NAS. All media on my NAS is in MKV containers, BD-rips with all audio and subtitle tracks. I’m a bit of a pixel peeper (thanks media OCD), so for big screen viewing I must Direct Play BD-rips. In my neighborhood we have fiber-to-the-home with 100Mbps synchronous speeds. Realistically it tends to average around 85-95Mbps. This setup works well for our viewing habits, which consists of a 65" LG OLED TV (NVIDIA Shield, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, webOS players (multiple clients for dogfooding), Harmony Hub w/ Elite remote, 5.1 surround), PMP on the same iMac, and 2 iPads. I’m missing a Roku I would say half of my streams are Direct Play while the other half are transcoded. With my current PMS I get 4 transcodes at 1080p/8Mbps (not including additional Direct Play streams), potentially more as I have the iPads set to 720p/3Mbps. Outside of testing, I have never had my server choke based on our current streaming needs. The max concurrent streams I expect to see with this setup are 2 Direct Play, 2 local transcodes, and 2 remote transcodes.
For fun and experimentation, I maintain another copy of all our media on a pocket-sized 4TB Seagate drive, having passed it all through Media Optimizer at 1080p/8Mbps. I use this as part of a mobile/travel no-internet-needed style PMS with the NVIDIA Shield as the server. Along with a travel-sized wifi router and a collection of electrical adapters, It makes for a nice backpack/carry-on kit.
@sremick said:
What’s your technical skill level? What’s your budget? How many clients simultaneously? What types of clients? How much storage needed now and projected into the future? Etc etc etc.
Even with what you’re asking, you’re not providing enough information for someone to answer you.
I don’t have a technical skill level. I know how to download files from my e-mail, use iTunes, hook up a HDTV and use Windows.
My budget would at least $500-600.
Currently, I have a Roku 3 and Roku Premiere and the Plex is running on a weak Seagate Personal Cloud 3TB hooked up to a 5TB external hard drive.
If I could get a good server working, I would like to have at least two iPhones be able to download music with a premium music library on top with what I have now.
I would like to build a premium music library. I have 20,000 tracks that are all in MP3 format. I have a DVD and small blu ray library that are all encoded in MKV format. Most of the those file sizes are under 2GB.
I was looking at the Dell XPS 8900 Desktop.
My current issue now is that whenever I try to create a Plex Premium library, the NAS freezes because it cannot handle the amount of scanning processes that is performed when performing audio fingerprinting.
If you can provide more information as what I should post, that would be great. Thank you for a quick start.
@kinoCharlino said: @SanchezHouse, you’re going to find a wide range of opinions on this – which it seems is exactly what you’re after. To help give some direction to the community to better assist you, providing the details that @sremick asked for would be helpful as there really is no one size fits all approach. We wouldn’t want to recommend something to you that is overkill on cost and performance, or something that is not going to meet your needs and turns out to be a pain point.
Let’s start with how many people do you expect to watch simultaneously and what devices will they be using?
At best, I would have at least two streams of videos going at the same time. The video sizes are under 2GB and at best have 5-7MB per second in MKV format. For me, the real issue is building on a great premium music library which times out with my weak Seagate Personal Cloud. It has a ARM processor. I contacted Plex directly and they told me, upgrade to a server without an ARM processor and you should see a difference in your server performance. Refer to my last comment for more tech details. Your thoughts?
The Dell PowerEdge T20 Mini-tower Server (1 x Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 Quad-core (4 Core) 3.20 GHz - 4 GB Installed DDR3 SDRAM) would provide more than enough horsepower for your needs and fall well within your budget. If you don’t mind shopping from 3rd party sellers on Amazon, you can grab one now for $400 or less. From time to time, SlickDeals has it for even less. This would be a good solution for you if you are ok with a buzzing tower for a server.
If you want to go smaller, quieter, less energy – then an NVIDIA Shield Pro would work fine. Imagine a Roku or Apple TV on steroids… you get a Plex server, client, and gaming device in one. It will not be as powerful as the Dell PowerEdge T20, but it will be much smaller and quieter. For a PMS, I would only suggest the Shield Pro for $300, which comes with a 500GB internal hard drive. The internal drive is important for having adequate space for your PMS’ library.
The Dell PowerEdge T20 Mini-tower Server (1 x Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 Quad-core (4 Core) 3.20 GHz - 4 GB Installed DDR3 SDRAM) would provide more than enough horsepower for your needs and fall well within your budget. If you don’t mind shopping from 3rd party sellers on Amazon, you can grab one now for $400 or less. From time to time, SlickDeals has it for even less. This would be a good solution for you if you are ok with a buzzing tower for a server.
If you want to go smaller, quieter, less energy – then an NVIDIA Shield Pro would work fine. Imagine a Roku or Apple TV on steroids… you get a Plex server, client, and gaming device in one. It will not be as powerful as the Dell PowerEdge T20, but it will be much smaller and quieter. For a PMS, I would only suggest the Shield Pro for $300, which comes with a 500GB internal hard drive. The internal drive is important for having adequate space for your PMS’ library.
Thank you for your response. I will look into both products.
For the NVIDIA Shield Pro, the following has been stated when running a Premium Music Library on this device:
Premium Music Libraries
“Premium music libraries can be created when running on NVIDIA SHIELD and most of the premium features work fine. “Plex Mix” is not currently supported when running on NVIDIA SHIELD.”
Will a Premium Music Library be created without problems on this device?
Also, about updates:
Unlike a regular Plex Media Server you might run on a computer or NAS device, you can’t arbitrarily update the server version. Instead, new Plex Media Server updates will be released on Google Play specifically for the NVIDIA SHIELD.
Today, there was an update for the Plex Media Server. How are the relationships between Google Play and Plex to update the server will releases are available? How long would I have to wait to get update for the server?
@SanchezHouse, you’ve done your homework! I’ll address each point individually.
“Premium music libraries can be created when running on NVIDIA SHIELD and most of the premium features work fine. “Plex Mix” is not currently supported when running on NVIDIA SHIELD.”
Because of the different hardware, some features might trail behind the desktop PMS release. You might want to take a look at these articles for more info on using the Shield as a PMS. NVIDIA Shield PMS articles
Will a Premium Music Library be created without problems on this device?
You should not experience issues creating a Premium Music library on the Shield, though it will take longer than a beefy Intel CPU. This is true of any library scanning actually, just that Premium Music library scans are more involved than a movie library scan. The benefit of the Shield is its size, power consumption, and doubling as a player and gaming system. It works well, but will not be as powerful as a desktop-class Intel CPU.
Unlike a regular Plex Media Server you might run on a computer or NAS device, you can’t arbitrarily update the server version. Instead, new Plex Media Server updates will be released on Google Play specifically for the NVIDIA SHIELD.
Today, there was an update for the Plex Media Server. How are the relationships between Google Play and Plex to update the server will releases are available? How long would I have to wait to get update for the server?
The Shield uses a modified (by NVIDIA) version of the Android TV platform. Similar to Apple’s ecosystem, all updates go from Plex to Google, then to the user’s device. On a PC or Mac you can apply the updates yourself or have Plex handle it automatically – the choice is yours. Updates on the Shield have their own process that we follow, though the lag time is minimal, usually a day or two.
“Premium music libraries can be created when running on NVIDIA SHIELD and most of the premium features work fine. “Plex Mix” is not currently supported when running on NVIDIA SHIELD.”
Because of the different hardware, some features might trail behind the desktop PMS release. You might want to take a look at these articles for more info on using the Shield as a PMS. NVIDIA Shield PMS articles
Will a Premium Music Library be created without problems on this device?
You should not experience issues creating a Premium Music library on the Shield, though it will take longer than a beefy Intel CPU. This is true of any library scanning actually, just that Premium Music library scans are more involved than a movie library scan. The benefit of the Shield is its size, power consumption, and doubling as a player and gaming system. It works well, but will not be as powerful as a desktop-class Intel CPU.
Unlike a regular Plex Media Server you might run on a computer or NAS device, you can’t arbitrarily update the server version. Instead, new Plex Media Server updates will be released on Google Play specifically for the NVIDIA SHIELD.
Today, there was an update for the Plex Media Server. How are the relationships between Google Play and Plex to update the server will releases are available? How long would I have to wait to get update for the server?
The Shield uses a modified (by NVIDIA) version of the Android TV platform. Similar to Apple’s ecosystem, all updates go from Plex to Google, then to the user’s device. On a PC or Mac you can apply the updates yourself or have Plex handle it automatically – the choice is yours. Updates on the Shield have their own process that we follow, though the lag time is minimal, usually a day or two.
I would like to know; is there a Desktop Intel CPU worth looking into? A PC that could run Windows 10. I have seen some PC’s that run a Intel i7 CPU. Perhaps this is work?
I lucked into all of my PLEX server gear due to my company generating a lot of hardware we no longer needed as well as buying stuff we thought we would need and then decided not to.
My PLEX server is on a discarded 2009 Dell Precision T5500, Intel Xeon X5650 @ 2.76Ghz with six cores, 18 gb RAM running Win 10. There is no monitor or keyboard on this guy normally. All access is through a free version of TeamViewer. Excellent remote access utility that I recommend. The only thing this box does is PLEX. It has no video card, a 250g SSD C: drive and a 1TB Data drive that doesn’t have much on it.
All the media is on a four year old Synology 12-bay DS2413+ NAS that was purchased by my IT department and never used so I asked for it and they gave it to me. This has seven 5TB Toshiba x300 drives and about 19TB in use. I don’t load PLEX on the Synology box because the Dell is more powerful and the cpu in the Synology is not that quick (INTEL Atom D2700, two core, 2.13GHz with 4G Ram). If the NAS is doing data scrubbing or expanding the RAID, the CPU can get hammered so doing PLEX stuff too would be too much. The only stuff I have actually had to buy has been the drives for the Synology box and assorted RAM upgrades. I count myself very lucky.
I’d like to jump in on this as it seems to be the best place to ask this question. (happy to be pointed to a better topic if needed)
I’ve been running PLEX on my computer with a TB drive that is getting full (not to mention no redundancy). So I’m looking for an upgrade.
I think that an external HD isn’t enough. PLEX needs to run on a CPU, correct? Thus, a separate computer of some sort will be important. Or, will a stand alone NAS work? The NAS could have RAID and just plug into the network whether the computer is in the house or not.
Or, just better to buy a little tower with a good network connection and good computing power and a RAID array?
Thanks for your insights. I’m pushing it out through Apple TV or XBOX One onto a 55" TV. All hardwired to the network (well, not the TV).
Budget would be a little open. Depends on a NAS or Computer, I suppose. Big difference.
EDIT: or, would I just run this on XBOX One with a larger HD/Ext HD? I’m reading on the NVIDIA Shield and isn’t it just an XBOX-like thing?
Sonicboom, external HD will work if fast enough. I suggest looking into building a separate pc just for Plex. I used 10 year old parts plus a couple new TB drives. I got a program called Unraid to solve all backup/redundency and OS needs. Works flawlessly with Plex.
I am running PMS on a Netgear Nighthawk R9000, which has been great up to now up to 1080! I am switching over to 4K content and it seems to struggle and give a little jitter every minute or so, not sure if it is the router, but i guess so. Does any here have a R9000 setup running 4k transcodes without any jitter?
@SanchezHouse if your primary desire is wanting plex premium music, then any x86 based device should suffice.
that means, laptops, any size nas with a intel x86 processor, any old desktop or even old server if you find one on craigslist or ebay.
You do not really want anything arm based with such a large music library.
4-8 gig of ram should plenty for most devices, although if you use a desktop pc and want to use it for other stuff including plex, then obviously more memory is helpful.
My own personal plex server is a readynas 528 upgraded to 16 gig ram.
It handles anything that will direct play to a client, and 1080p transcodes fairly well but is not well suited for 4k video transcoding.
My premium music library is a 3+tb 200K+ tracks, with a plex video library of ~30tb mixed dvd/bluray/4k rips.
I would say half of my streams are Direct Play while the other half are transcoded. With my current PMS I get 4 transcodes at 1080p/8Mbps (not including additional Direct Play streams), potentially more as I have the iPads set to 720p/3Mbps. Outside of testing, I have never had my server choke based on our current streaming needs. The max concurrent streams I expect to see with this setup are 2 Direct Play, 2 local transcodes, and 2 remote transcodes.