What The Plex?

[Sgt_Swanny]

Hi all, 

I just wanted to start a discussion more for curiosity on how you have your Plex servers setup, how you manage and organize it. What you house the components in? etc

For mine I have it set up an old gaming pc case with a Micro Atx motherboard with an AMD FX-4300 CPU. 1 SSD to run the OP (Windows 10 Pro) and 2 HDDs, one to hold the media for Plex and the other is used as a network drive. The 2 HDDs are then backed up to a NAS daily.

For naming the media files I used a program called Filebot it costs 6 USD but is worth it. To organize the media I keep TV shows, Films, and Music in separate folders then have subfolders for HD and SD I try and keep all video files at 1080p. 

It connects via an ethernet cable directly to the router. I manage it using the free version of Teamviewer. it's not a fantastic machine but gets the job done. However, I would love to hear how you guys do it.

[ENTERPRISE]

You may find the following prior threads useful, anything else just ask

 

 

 

[axipher]

I run Plex on my UnRaid server where it has direct access to the media.  Plex has access to a GTX 1050 Ti for transcoding that can handle 2 4k transcodes at just a little over real-time or 2 1080p streams with plenty of speed and buffering.  Plex will always need a full CPU thread for the audio processing, just a small annoyance to keep in mind for any transcoding.  If playing form your LAN, or remotely and using direct stream of the file itself, then the server itself shouldn't really be doing much at all aside form serving the file.

 

I sort out my media by type as well:

• TV_Shows
• Anime_Dubbed
• Anime_Subbed
• Movies
• Music
• HD_Demos

 

I chose not to use the chapter thumbnails feature of Plex as that steals way too much hardware space and processing time for no tangible benefit for me.

 

File naming can be taken care of by lots of different tools, but I always try to use S##E#### with leading 0's to allow for shows that might get more than 9 seasons, or use weird episode numbering and go over 999.  It's a couple extra characters in a filename and more of a personal preference to make things look nicer if I even need to manage the files themselves.

[ENTERPRISE]

4 hours ago, axipher said:

I run Plex on my UnRaid server where it has direct access to the media.  Plex has access to a GTX 1050 Ti for transcoding that can handle 2 4k transcodes at just a little over real-time or 2 1080p streams with plenty of speed and buffering.  Plex will always need a full CPU thread for the audio processing, just a small annoyance to keep in mind for any transcoding.  If playing form your LAN, or remotely and using direct stream of the file itself, then the server itself shouldn't really be doing much at all aside form serving the file.

 

I sort out my media by type as well:

• TV_Shows
• Anime_Dubbed
• Anime_Subbed
• Movies
• Music
• HD_Demos

 

I chose not to use the chapter thumbnails feature of Plex as that steals way too much hardware space and processing time for no tangible benefit for me.

 

File naming can be taken care of by lots of different tools, but I always try to use S##E#### with leading 0's to allow for shows that might get more than 9 seasons, or use weird episode numbering and go over 999.  It's a couple extra characters in a filename and more of a personal preference to make things look nicer if I even need to manage the files themselves.

Really ? I am surprised that the chapter thumbnails creation causes high usage, I mean sure perhaps the CPU spikes for its initial creation. How much storage space of usage are we talking here ? Usually speaking thumbnails are small, unless they are the animated ones that I know you can have in Plex.

[axipher]

44 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Really ? I am surprised that the chapter thumbnails creation causes high usage, I mean sure perhaps the CPU spikes for its initial creation. How much storage space of usage are we talking here ? Usually speaking thumbnails are small, unless they are the animated ones that I know you can have in Plex.

Honestly can't remember, but at the time when I decided to rebuild my Plex server, it was taking up more space then just meta data, so I turned it off.

[ENTERPRISE]

16 hours ago, axipher said:

Honestly can't remember, but at the time when I decided to rebuild my Plex server, it was taking up more space then just meta data, so I turned it off.

That is fair enough, Will have to see what it is like my end, I cannot imagine it would be huge, but yes bigger than typical meta data.

[axipher]

One other thing to note about Plex is that it can have a /transcode folder mapped to somewhere else like a really fast SSD that's just used to store the few minutes of transcoded buffer before it sends it out to players.  This can be a huge help on media server that just have spinning hard disks.

 

I don't have a link handy, but I remember some people just adding really fast USB 3.0 drives, or M.2 SSD's in a USB 3.0 enclosure to their servers and mapping the Plex transcode directory to that when all their internal SATA ports were used up by spinning bulk storage drives.

 

Also just having Plex installed on an SSD for all the metadata, thumbnails, posters, etc. can really make a huge difference for browsing through the library, especially if the hard drives are mainly used to store the media files and stay in a spun-down state most of the time.