Hey guys,
How many movies and tv series do you have on your plex server?
Do you have anyone sharing anything with you?
I’ve been interested to find out what’s average in terms of content for a while now. I’m a massive fan of archiving my DVDs and BluRays (although only just made legal here in the UK) and I’ve got around 900 movies and around 100 shows. There’s a few feature requests I’ve liked the sound of that don’t seem to gain traction such as bunching movie collections together inline so rather than 25+ bond movies it shows ‘James Bond’ which takes you a list of just James bond movies without manually adding a collection which you doesn’t show inline to the other movies.
This is just one example but I wondered if it was never taken up because the library sizes are quite small and manageable without this?
XBMC has had this feature for quite a while, and I agree it is a nice one. Plex does have the ability to group movies into user-defined collections; however, they can only be viewed as such when a sort filter is used on the library. Even if your filed were sorted into different collections, all 900 of your fils would still display under the “all movies” view. I have 850+ films, 180+ TV series, and several thousand music albums in my library, so I can appreciate the sometimes cumbersome nature of navigating through it all.
Yea I use collections, not often but this year I’ve set up a ‘Christmas’ collection. Collections are great for the wife to set up her favs or the kids and seasons etc. but like you said in ‘all movies’ navigation is cumbersome, I checked out my library and with 900+ movies I found that would be reduce to 600 actual items if the series or trilogies etc were grouped.
Frustrating that xbmc has this feature and yet we haven’t gotten it, same with the people wanting pvr functionality.
Glad to see others have large libraries, would love to hear from more people as I felt like I was in the top 1% of uber movie lovers lol
I have 1065 movies and 148 tv shows. I also would love collections. I’m currently not sharing with anyone.
I have a lot of media and over 20 remote accounts on it. I pump out nearly 1TB of usage.
I have ~1,600 movies and ~190 TV shows. I share with most of my family and a few of my friends, although only a couple of them actually use it regularly.
I inherited a large collection of movies and TV series on DVD and I have converted those to MKVs and MP4s. Combining those with my already extensive collection I have over 2000 movies and almost 300 TV series.
However I don't share with anyone as I really do not like anyone enough to go through the even minor hassle of making my server available to them.
BTW: I made the mistake of packing all my DVDs in just two boxes and found that 2600 or so DVDs are quite heavy. ;)
I also have, as part of my collection, nearly a thousand audiobooks that my uncle accumulated as his eyesight failed in his later years. These are included in my Plex library and several of them are even converted to mp4 format so Plex can play them but I do not use Plex much for those as Plex's support for audiobooks is abysmal at best. Just the ability to resume in audio would allow me to use Plex for audiobooks but that does not seem likely to happen. Also in mp4 form they are much larger and my storage space, whil large, is not unlimited.
Plex is an almost complete media solution for me but it is lacking. If support for audiobooks were added then I would share my library with the two close friends I have. They are severely vision impaired and could really benefit from easy access to my library. And before anyone asks I do share with them by other means but it would be better if they could simply browse and play from my server.
How many terabytes of storage have you got for 2000 movies ? 
@knights personally I go nuts for terabytes, I’ve currently got 10 4tb drives to house my collection, which replaced 10 2tb drives this year, don’t have the space in the case for more and don’t wanna spend much. Anyone got any solutions for more drives once the pc is maxed out (I mean ports, slots, pcie slots for extra cards). I don’t wanna spend much and I see that 6tb drives are out now 
I’m playing a dangerous game but I don’t have backup or raid solutions in place either
How many terabytes of storage have you got for 2000 movies ? :P
I have about 22 TB total of storage for video attached to my file serving computer but much of my library is duplicated so that I do not have to redo the conversions should there be a disk failure.
Storage is now so cheap that having plenty of space is not very costly.
Anyone using an external RAID enclosure? I am looking to add one to my setup (prefer eSATA or USB3 connection unless it includes a card that works with Linux). Recommendations welcome.
Currently I am using 4 3TB drives (2 internal and 2 external). I have had 2 drives die over the past 18 months and it is a major pain to restore (online backup using Crashplan).
By Libraries:
588 DVD Movies
55 TV Shows (174 Seasons, 2609 Episodes)
82 Musical Artists (162 Albums, 2115 Tracks)
Hundreds of Photos
Dozens of Home Videos, Cooking Videos, Music Videos, and Misc Video Clips
(Currently I am digitizing a couple dozen old Hi-8 and VHS Home Movies to add)
[Edit: Updated 1/13/15]
It's all sitting mostly in 1.5 TB of internal storage and 6 TB of external USB 3.0 connected storage (non-RAID):
[Edit: Just added a second one of these, empty for now, but researching 3 and 4 Terabyte drives for installation]
[sharedmedia=core:attachments:38802]
I'm playing a dangerous game but I don't have backup or raid solutions in place either
Ticking time bomb. You're going to do some serious crying when that fails.
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Ticking time bomb. You're going to do some serious crying when that fails.
yup, nothing more seriously upsetting than a few TB lost!
I think if you spent 5 minutes and figured out how long it would take to reacquire the media. then you'd do something about it!
50 3D Movies (Bluray Quality and growing quickly)
5 Pre-release (Cam Quality)
204 Christmas Movies
60 Learning (DVD Rips)
3446 Movies
704 Music Videos
780 Sports (720p NFL Games)
4893 TV Episodes (81 Shows, 291 Seasons)
8494 Music Albums
Resolutions across the board:
SD 12.6%
480p 12.5%
576p 1.8%
720p 41.4%
1080p 31.5%
Other 0.2%
I'm slowly replacing lower resolution files with 1080p. Everything is fully indexed and all videos are encoded in h.264 MP4 with a stereo track added as the first track (Dolby/DTS tracks are additional tracks encoded).
My server is shared with about 20 accounts that actively use it. A few more accounts that occasionally use it. Some accounts have multiple Rokus and I'll sometimes see 3 or 4 active streams from these "one" accounts. Many of the shared players (ie Rokus) are set at 4Mbps 720p resolution which causes lots of transcodes on my 720p/1080p movies. This is probably due to the Rokus being used on WIFI.
I've been manually converting many of my high-res movies to a 2nd file that is under 4Mbps 720p so Plex can stream this file instead of doing the transcodes. I simple use the "normal" file name with a [TC] in the name ie Abduction (2011) [TC].mp4. These TC files are not in the counts above. I've been using the built in transcoder in "sync" mode to generate these files to the "cloud" but have the cloud blocked via my router so they never get updated. I can then grab them. Still playing with this. I'll probably switch over to using ffmpeg or Handbrake to do this.
I'm presently working on adding a TV Recording Section (PVR) to my setup using the HDHomeRun Prime with CableCard on Verizon FIOS. Right now I'm experimenting/playing with Media Portal, MCE, NextPVR to find what's going to work best overall and allow me to have remote TIVO/Slingbox functionality. I'm getting tired of using Verizon FIOS DVRs with their "limited space". I want direct access for me in real-time to the recordings, remote scheduling, etc. I'll then setup commercial skip and automatic transcode to mp4 along with proper episode renaming for permanent storage of files into a new TV Recording section in Plex for all to enjoy.
At present all my files are available using both Plex and Madsonic. Madsonic (fork of Subsonic) is far better for pure music use then Plex especially on Phones. Madsonic also allows (if configured) a pure download of files instead of just playing them. This solves an issue for me where a few friends who travel a lot can easily grab/download a few videos to take with them on trips, etc. Madsonic allows quotas so this is easily managed.
I've been thinking of setting up a 2nd Plex server and splitting up the load a bit. I'm not positive but I believe the 9K albums are causing Plex to run a bit slower due to the increase in database/meta file sizes. I can defiantly feel a "slow down" in performance in "browsing sections" since I added them to Plex.
After I get the PVR functionality going to my liking I'm going to see if I can tackle distributed encoding of Plex so that it can have other computers on the network doing some of the real-time encoding.
So that's my setup for the moment. I also have 300/300 FIOS Internet. Don't ask me about storage. :)
@Cayars - WOWO Please can you post a thread on this with further details on the TC part as this sounds brilliant! I Could do with this!
@Cayars - WOWO Please can you post a thread on this with further details on the TC part as this sounds brilliant! I Could do with this!
The main thing is to make sure you turn on a setting in Plex called: Automatically Select Resolution (When multiple resolutions are available for a video, automatically use the best resolution below the maximum quality.). Plex will then choose the proper file to use based on what the client can do while direct playing the file.
How you create the file really isn't that important but you want to try and make sure it has only a stereo soundtrack, is in mp4 format and both the audio and video bitrates are under X (in my case 4Mbps). Of course also make sure it's equal or under 720p resolution also. By default at "High" setting the cloud sync feature does this which is why I experimented with it.
This should be easily scripted/programmed if I took the time to figure out the proper command lines of either our transcoder or ffmpeg. I was going to dive into this after getting my PVR up and working.
Carlo
please make a thread of your system. would love to see the PVR capabilities and your own development of off-loading the transcoding.
Will do in about a week. Let me get the PVR up and running first to make it worthwhile.
