Hey guys first post here and new PLEX user. Hopefully I’m posting this in the right place. I’m looking to get opinions on which device to use for my first PLEX server. As of right now it will just be myself streaming (music and movies). I’m on the road a lot for work and I think this should be very convenient (as long as I have a solid WiFi connection at my hotel?) but I’d like to have enough CPU to add streams later for family and friends. I’ll be using my Sony Bravia as my PLEX client when I’m at home and my iPhone X and or Amazon Firestick on the road. So far I have looked into the Nighthawk X10 router, Intel NUC, Mac Mini, and a desktop tower. I’m currently leasing a router with Xfinity so the Nighthawk sounded like a good idea. Currently at 200 mbps DL/15mbps UL. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
a cheap and old computer on ebay or local equivalent with a decent processor and 8 gigs of ram is a very good buy, run it on ubuntu. it’s a bit of a learning curve with linux, but just download the software and you’re good to go. offers good expandability and good flexibility for future.
Buy new hardware, and make sure to at least include a modest amount of ram (8 is good, more is always better), a very fast processor and a very beefy videocard that supports hardware encoding.
- You will need the videocard for all HEVC/h265 content that you would want to play: Plex clients cannot handle it so the server needs to transcode it.
- You will need the beefy processor, for when the hardware encoding fails. Sadly it crashes a lot when used, so unless you want to restart your server after watching 2 or 3 episodes, you’ll need a good processor that can handle at least transcoding for one stream.
Unless you go very overboard with the specs, you can forget about multiple streams for family and friends.
@“Karl Blixt” said:
a cheap and old computer on ebay or local equivalent with a decent processor and 8 gigs of ram is a very good buy, run it on ubuntu. it’s a bit of a learning curve with linux, but just download the software and you’re good to go. offers good expandability and good flexibility for future.
I agree. CPU performance has barely changed in 5 years so even relatively old systems are perfectly adequate. The absolute best bargain is a used ex-corporate PC off eBay. I recently bought an HP Prodesk 400 G1 with an i3-4130 8GB RAM & 320GB disk for just £70 & if you shop around you can find one with an i5 for not a whole lot more. It’s dead easy to set up with Ubuntu.
Forget about buying a load of storage just get G Suite for Business for $10/€7/£6.60 per month for unlimited storage on Google Drive. Mount it with rclone & it works just kind a local drive but you don’t need to worry about management, backups or hardware failures.
If you plan a lot of remote use then put it all in the Cloud by renting a VPS.
My first one ran on a crappy AMD box I had laying around. Plex doesn’t ask for much when it’s just serving up files. I successfully ran two 1080p streams in network just fine. I’m considering spinning that box back up as a backup server.
I beefed up alter with a Best Buy open box Dell XPS i7 for $700, which I’ve been running ever since.
A lot of people are telling me not to use a laptop or a tower as my server because of high power consumption. Of course something low power and quiet would be ideal but I feel like I’d have to spend $800 to build the Intel NUC with the specs I want. Am I overthinking this whole thing?
I was using a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud for my PMS & this must be the lowest powered NAS capable of running Plex server. It worked great. I tested it with 5 simultaneous 1080p streams as I had decent clients & no remote users so that I was Direct Playing everything.
If you can configure all of your media to Direct Play, you don’t need much at all. CPUs from the 70s could probably handle those streams without breaking a sweat.
@AmazingRando24 said:
If you can configure all of your media to Direct Play, you don’t need much at all. CPUs from the 70s could probably handle those streams without breaking a sweat.
But if I’m going to be streaming when I’m out of town it obviously won’t be direct play. Maybe I should just focus on 1 transcoded stream, that beating my own.
A fella I emailed yesterday just got back to me with this…
“Good morning,
I have a Dell 7010 Small Form Factor which I can outfit with an i7-3770 CPU (~9500 passmark score), 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD for $300.
It’s very small and fan noise shouldn’t be an issue as it’s designed to be nearly silent.
It’ll have the most recent Win10, and I can install a wifi card if you need it (although I’m fairly certain you’ll be using ethernet).
Let me know if that works for you.
Thanks!”
Actually, you can achieve Direct Play remotely. Lots of my files play that way on friends Xboxes. You just have to match what the client device wants, and it will work, provided your internet upload speed can keep up.
@AmazingRando24 said:
Actually, you can achieve Direct Play remotely. Lots of my files play that way on friends Xboxes. You just have to match what the client device wants, and it will work, provided your internet upload speed can keep up.
I see. I thought direct play meant you always had to be on the same network as your server.
@khauser86 said:
@AmazingRando24 said:
Actually, you can achieve Direct Play remotely. Lots of my files play that way on friends Xboxes. You just have to match what the client device wants, and it will work, provided your internet upload speed can keep up.I see. I thought direct play meant you always had to be on the same network as your server.
No. Direct Play means that the media plays without transcoding. It has nothing to do with where it plays.
@Elijah_Baley said:
@khauser86 said:
@AmazingRando24 said:
Actually, you can achieve Direct Play remotely. Lots of my files play that way on friends Xboxes. You just have to match what the client device wants, and it will work, provided your internet upload speed can keep up.I see. I thought direct play meant you always had to be on the same network as your server.
No. Direct Play means that the media plays without transcoding. It has nothing to do with where it plays.
However if your upload bandwidth is constrained remote users may have to transcode to lower bit rate.> @khauser86 said:
A lot of people are telling me not to use a laptop or a tower as my server because of high power consumption. Of course something low power and quiet would be ideal but I feel like I’d have to spend $800 to build the Intel NUC with the specs I want. Am I overthinking this whole thing?
Yes, you want a server somewhere hidden away in your home & you want decent clients like an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield or Amazon Fire TV 4K or Odroid C2. The amount of power the server will consume is trivial. If you had a HTPC besides your TV you might want something small & quiet but if it’s in the spare bedroom who cares?
Speaking of… here’s a remote stream direct playing now…
@khauser86 said:
A fella I emailed yesterday just got back to me with this…“Good morning,
I have a Dell 7010 Small Form Factor which I can outfit with an i7-3770 CPU (~9500 passmark score), 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD for $300.
It’s very small and fan noise shouldn’t be an issue as it’s designed to be nearly silent.
It’ll have the most recent Win10, and I can install a wifi card if you need it (although I’m fairly certain you’ll be using ethernet).Let me know if that works for you.
Thanks!”
That’s the kind of system that I was describing. A used ex-corporate PC from Dell or Hp or Lenovo. They are built like tanks & cheap as chips. You will find an i7 for less than $300 if you shop around dell 7010 i7 for sale | eBay A Gen 3 or Gen 4 i5/i7 will be ample even an i3 if your don’t transcode much.
Triple check the specs of your iX processor to make sure it supports Intel Quick Sync which will allow Plex to use Hardware Acceleration. This is yet another pretty good way of diverting load off the processor and getting more bang for your buck.
(Plex Pass required to enable the feature)
@khauser86 said:
A lot of people are telling me not to use a laptop or a tower as my server because of high power consumption. Of course something low power and quiet would be ideal but I feel like I’d have to spend $800 to build the Intel NUC with the specs I want. Am I overthinking this whole thing?
For a first server, you probably are overthinking it. I run on a headless Kaby Lake i7 NUC, and it’s an absolute dream, but if you store your media in direct playable formats for your clients, you can get away with very little horsepower. I ran my first server on a spare Dell tower that was decommissioned at my buddy’s work, and plenty of people happily run the server on a NAS, so if you organize the media correctly in a way that takes load off of the server, you can run on very little and get a feel for what you require. I would advise starting on the very cheap and making the determination about whether it’s a platform you get enough value out of to justify the investment in better hardware.
@fecaleagle said:
I would advise starting on the very cheap and making the determination about whether it’s a platform you get enough value out of to justify the investment in better hardware.
I second this. As I stated earlier, I started with things I already had laying around, and that ran incredibly well for me until I decided to get a bit more serious.
@nigelpb said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
@khauser86 said:
@AmazingRando24 said:
Actually, you can achieve Direct Play remotely. Lots of my files play that way on friends Xboxes. You just have to match what the client device wants, and it will work, provided your internet upload speed can keep up.I see. I thought direct play meant you always had to be on the same network as your server.
No. Direct Play means that the media plays without transcoding. It has nothing to do with where it plays.
However if your upload bandwidth is constrained remote users may have to transcode to lower bit rate.> @khauser86 said:
A lot of people are telling me not to use a laptop or a tower as my server because of high power consumption. Of course something low power and quiet would be ideal but I feel like I’d have to spend $800 to build the Intel NUC with the specs I want. Am I overthinking this whole thing?
Yes, you want a server somewhere hidden away in your home & you want decent clients like an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield or Amazon Fire TV 4K or Odroid C2. The amount of power the server will consume is trivial. If you had a HTPC besides your TV you might want something small & quiet but if it’s in the spare bedroom who cares?
I have the client covered. My Sony Bravia X900F and my iPhone X. My server will be near my TV since that’s where my router is set up and will have everything hardwired Ethernet.
