What’s the proper way of setting up Plex to run on a Windows Pro machine (not a windows server).
What accounts do I run it as? It doesn’t look like it would be a good idea to run it as an admin account. Perhaps I can setup a user that has limited access to a Plex directory and nothing else?
What’s the proper way of starting up the server? It does not appear to setup a windows service. I was thinking of setting up windows scheduler to automatically launch Plex and run it as a special user account with limited access.
I’m assuming Windows 10, but most of these should apply to 8 as well. It’s been a while since I’ve used 7.
For the user account, you’re planning similar to my setup: Set up a limited user account, disconnected from my Microsoft account. I set it up as admin to install Plex and anything else needed (like Tautulli), then I can reduce permissions.
I connect my server to a read-only NAS to see media. so local file permissions aren’t a part of my setup. But yep, you should be able to set up media as read-only.
If you want to set up a clean Windows 10 install with a local account, beware that it needs to be disconnected from the Internet during setup, or Microsoft won’t show a local account option.
Don’t be surprised if you run into a few hiccups along the way. Most people just log in as administrator with full access to the system, so you’re probably an edge case with the level of lockdown being planned. I can’t remember if I had any major issues at setup.
I set up netplwiz to automatically log on the limited user, then have a shortcut in startup that automatically locks the screen. This is a box at home; that ticks off the “good enough” options list for me.
There is a third-party script to set up Plex as a service; however, if you plan to use hardware acceleration for transcoding, that’s not supported in Windows (it’s a Windows limitation, not a Plex one).
To have hardware transcoding work in Windows, you need two things:
Have an user logged in
If using Intel graphics acceleration, you need to have a monitor plugged into the HDMI port (a dummy plug works fine too). For Nvidia, my card works with or without a monitor, FWIW. No idea on AMD, which is supposed to work in Windows.
