Running Plex from Router to Apple TV

General Discussions
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Hi Everyone :slight_smile: I am new to Plex, so please excuse me if this question is really basic or in any other way stupid :slight_smile:

I have a Netgear router in my house, with an external hard disk attached which contains about 1 TB of multimedia files.

I would love to be able to stream this in an easy way to my Apple TV, so I stumbled upon Plex. It was an easy set up everything works fine, I am running the Plex media server from my Mac and I can easily scroll around in my video files from the Apple TV in the Plex app.

QUESTION: Although it works fine it is quite annoying that I need to have my MacBook running whenever I want to access my media files, so I’m trying to find a solution to this. But it seems the only solution to this is buying pretty pricey NAS equipment and new hard disks connecting this all to my router and letting the NAS do the transcoding. The Synology DS218 seems to be a popular one, but before I have this and two new hard disks it will put me back over $1000, but is there no other way of achieving the same thing??

Any help greatly appreciated, thanks :slight_smile:

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Pelx is a client/server system and all files it plays must travel from storage to server to client. That is the way it works and that is how most all similar systems work. If you want just to play files on your client without a server running then Plex is not for you.

I just run a moderatly powerful Windows computer (purchased for less than $400) to act as a server that is running all the time and then I can use most any client I want. I recommend that servers have no regular tasks. I also recommend against NAS systems as they are too risky. Just connect a bunch of external hard drives to a computer and run DrivePool to combine the volumes and run your server there as well. I also use a box fan blowing across the whole system to keep things cool. That is both the simplest system and the easiest to maintain.

And get plenty of storage. There really is no such thing as too much storage. Remember the data center saying: “Data grows to fill available space.” That is just as true for media files as for simple data.

Edit: I forgot to add that it is best to get your media in a form that direct plays on your clients. That way transcoding is never an issue.

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No other way i can think of, you could just plug the external HD into your TV if it uses USB. Most TV’s support it

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