Plex Server

[TheRoyalDoyle]

Anyone have any experience with Plex?

[SaladFingers]

Do you have any specific question about it?

[Lurick]

Yah, I've got a huge plex server setup and it's great for what I need to do, both for local and non-local streaming and transcoding. Anything specific you had questions about?

[TheRoyalDoyle]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Yah, I've got a huge plex server setup and it's great for what I need to do, both for local and non-local streaming and transcoding. Anything specific you had questions about?

Awesome, I am mostly interested in system specs, as well as integration with all the devices is claims to work with. Any issues with Xbox or cell phones?

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

Awesome, I am mostly interested in system specs, as well as integration with all the devices is claims to work with. Any issues with Xbox or cell phones?

Don't have an X-Box but a buddy of mine streams to his PS3 and PS4 without issues. I don't really stream to my phone too much but when I do I never notice anything troubling unless I'm on a crap connection but that's local to the phone and not the server.

 

As for specs, you want a Passmark score of around 2,000 for every 1080p transcoded stream you'll be doing, so how many people and what resolutions?

[Eniqmatic]

Plex works fine on Xbox and mobile, that's one of the best things about it is it is so widely compatible. Even devices that do no have specific apps, you can create your own DLNA profile for it, providing it supports DLNA.

[SaladFingers]

If you don't want to build a computer for it, you can also find pre-built NAS boxes for which Plex has working versions. More limited, but mostly un-managed and less costly.

[TheRoyalDoyle]

9 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Don't have an X-Box but a buddy of mine streams to his PS3 and PS4 without issues. I don't really stream to my phone too much but when I do I never notice anything troubling unless I'm on a crap connection but that's local to the phone and not the server.

 

As for specs, you want a Passmark score of around 2,000 for every 1080p transcoded stream you'll be doing, so how many people and what resolutions?

5 people will be using it fairly regularly, I assume a nice fast Raid array will be necessary, how RAM/CPU intensive is it?

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

5 people will be using it fairly regularly, I assume a nice fast Raid array will be necessary, how RAM/CPU intensive is it?

RAID is always a plus, it's very CPU intensive and for 5 people at 1080p then you'll need a CPU with a passmark around 10,000 or higher if you want to do other stuff as well. If it will be a mix of 720p and 1080 then a passmark of maybe 8500-ish will be sufficient. As for RAM, 16GB or 32GB should be more than enough.

[TheRoyalDoyle]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

RAID is always a plus, it's very CPU intensive and for 5 people at 1080p then you'll need a CPU with a passmark around 10,000 or higher if you want to do other stuff as well. If it will be a mix of 720p and 1080 then a passmark of maybe 8500-ish will be sufficient. As for RAM, 16GB or 32GB should be more than enough.

Will most likely be 100% 1080. Thanks for the info, I will start looking around!

[Lurick]

2 minutes ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

Will most likely be 100% 1080. Thanks for the info, I will start looking around!

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

That should provide you a list of CPUs that meet the requirements with a score of 10K+

The E5-2670 or around there should be plenty.

[TheRoyalDoyle]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

That should provide you a list of CPUs that meet the requirements with a score of 10K+

Already there! Thank You!

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

Already there! Thank You!

Best bang for the buck is probably the E5-2670 (v1), which I just edited into my previous post, lol.

[manikyath]

plex hates my router for some reason, it's something the plex folks know about, but cant really pinpoint a solution for.

 

i like the software, but i simply cant use it.

[manikyath]

8 minutes ago, Lurick said:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

That should provide you a list of CPUs that meet the requirements with a score of 10K+

The E5-2670 or around there should be plenty.

just wanna let you know that those folks seem to hugely favor both intel and nvidia (coming from an intel/nvidia person, btw.)

[CtrlAltELITE]

I use my Nvidia Shield TV as my plex server with my low power NAS (Asustor AS1004T, dual core ARM) mounted as storage. I've found the shield can handle 3 transcoded streams at once no problem, 5 may work if a few of them are direct play. Not bad considering the shield is <£200 (I got mine for £100 in a sale). You just need to make sure you are using the proper format for your media as old DivX video standards arn't GPU hardware accelerated and cause the little low power CPU to chug

[TheRoyalDoyle]

I all ready have a spare ASUS Z170 Pro sitting aroundand 16gig of DDR4 that is not being used, so  I was considering just using that. Paired with the Intel Xeon E3-1240 Vf5 (Passmark of 10391) The CPU is more than I would like to spend, but considering I have a MOBO/RAM I think it is worth the expense, then all I would need is some storage solution.

 

I am also running a full 1GBPS network, so I was thinking about adding nice NIC.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

I all ready have a spare ASUS Z170 Pro sitting aroundand 16gig of DDR4 that is not being used, so  I was considering just using that. Paired with the Intel Xeon E3-1240 Vf5 (Passmark of 10391) The CPU is more than I would like to spend, but considering I have a MOBO/RAM I think it is worth the expense, then all I would need is some storage solution.

 

I am also running a full 1GBPS network, so I was thinking about adding nice NIC.

that's a chip without iGPU, so you'd have to add a GPU as well, i'd rather just suggest you to buy an i5/i7

[TheRoyalDoyle]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

that's a chip without iGPU, so you'd have to add a GPU as well, i'd rather just suggest you to buy an i5/i7

Great, point. I might have a spare GPU laying around somewhere....

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

Great, point. I might have a spare GPU laying around somewhere....

you wouldnt be the first making that mistake, and if looking at xeons with iGPU, they're pretty much the same price as the comparable i5/i7, so you may as well.

[Sprawlie]

Plex is an interesting beast. I've been running a plex setup for many years. again, specific questions, I'd be glad to answer:

 

Plex is highly scale-able. From fairly low end machines that only serve  up media, to on the fly transcoding.

 

There's no "THIS MUCH CPU POWER!!!!" requirement really. It's going to depend on the type of playback that's happening. If you're having to transcode all 5 streams at once, you'll probably need a lot of CPU power since PLex only uses CPU transcode. But if you are direct playing media there's virtually no load as no transcoding needs to take place.

 

Currently on an i5-4570, I'm able to handle 4 transcode 1080p streams at once. I'm also using only 7200RPM hard drives in a non-raid setup, and have not once hit a bottleneck of IO from Plex. (streaming media really does not saturate even a modern SATA hard disk. If you're looking to RAID, it should be for redundancy purposes.

 

[Dark]

You certainly don't need a RAID array for a few streams, unless you're looking for redundancy.

 

My old guest PMS (4670k, 120GB SSD, 5TB 7.2k) has seen 8 simultaneous transcodes of 1080P content without an issue. 

 

We we tested my new guest PMS (vm instance in VMware 6.5 on a solid state array and 16 threads) and had 21 transcodes of 1080P content from 7 different locations. Probably could've had more but it was already proving greater than I'll need. 

 

My home PMS is on an E3 powered QNAP but it serves 4K content as well.

[Sprawlie]

45 minutes ago, Dark said:

You certainly don't need a RAID array for a few streams, unless you're looking for redundancy.

 

My old guest PMS (4670k, 120GB SSD, 5TB 7.2k) has seen 8 simultaneous transcodes of 1080P content without an issue. 

 

We we tested my new guest PMS (vm instance in VMware 6.5 on a solid state array and 16 threads) and had 21 transcodes of 1080P content from 7 different locations. Probably could've had more but it was already proving greater than I'll need. 

 

My home PMS is on an E3 powered QNAP but it serves 4K content as well.

I didn't know Plex supported 4k yet!

 

do you know off the top of your head if the Plex App on a samsung 4k TV has support? Haven't thought about testing yet

 

[gamerking]

19 hours ago, TheRoyalDoyle said:

Awesome, I am mostly interested in system specs, as well as integration with all the devices is claims to work with. Any issues with Xbox or cell phones?

it all comes down to what the device supports flac aac ac3 audio ect mp4 .mkv  video ect you can have a potato server if it doesn't have to transcode at all .

i love plex makes all my bluray/dvd's now in one place.

6 hours ago, Sprawlie said:

I didn't know Plex supported 4k yet!

 

do you know off the top of your head if the Plex App on a samsung 4k TV has support? Haven't thought about testing yet

 

it does network and drives have to be able to play  the media

[Dark]

On 1/18/2017 at 9:56 PM, Sprawlie said:

I didn't know Plex supported 4k yet!

 

do you know off the top of your head if the Plex App on a samsung 4k TV has support? Haven't thought about testing yet

 

Not too sure about all smart tvs (I've heard some do not support it,  but that may have changed).  I use an nvidia shield as our sole STB at each TV. 

 

Quick screen cap cap off the iPad app...