The easiest home media server (SPONSORED)

[ripitagain]

I've been using Plex hardware encoding using a Quadro P4000. It's a tank and can take on many streams. However, my 4K movies have TrueHD7.1 audio. Plex does not use your graphics card to encode the audio. The result is, steaming a 4K movie with the TrueHD audio track will consume nearly all a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X capacity. Has anyone ran into this issue?

 

[sub68]

7 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

Long time LTT watcher, never post to the forum, but I just had to comment on this one.

 

You start off the video completing dismissing Google Drive as being too expensive and then continue to list options that are SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive. If you buy an Nvidia Shield Pro as demoed in the video it would take you over 10 years to see any financial benefit (and when you consider the electrical cost of running a server in your own home, you'd never see any benefit).

 

I get it, you use It, they've sponsored a video for you, but this is straight up bad journalism and is misleading your viewers.

I dare you to find a cheaper solution than 1.5TB worth of free hard drives.

You can also use a used dell optiplex I have seen 6th-7th gen intel ones for 50 USD

3 hours ago, bluehawk said:

 

 

I will also add that Google can monitor files you store on your drive and can deactivate your drive if they think you are violating their ToS which seems random or arbitrary. My Google account was deactivated because Google said there were files against the ToS on my drive. I don't know what files and there's no way to contact Google to resolve the matter. I researched the issue and some said their account was suspended for just putting music on their drive. In the end I lost access to my Gmail, my Google photos with a decade worth of photos, and my drive as a result and google has no customer support service. I was meaning to back them up elsewhere but the account was suspended before I could now it's all gone. Don't trust Google 

This is one reason why I keep my photos on external hard drives.

[JFTiger]

I'm curious if he compresses the files to save space. I've ripped about half my DVD collection and am using about 2tb of space.  I've not started on my Blu-ray disks so I expect the usage to explode once I start that project.

If he does, what method to use and what settings.

[AbsoluteWoo]

11 hours ago, Lurick said:

You know that 10TB of google drive is $600/year right? Most people aren't storing 500GB of media, they have many TB. Plus you now have the hassle of downloading from google drive to watch a video whereas local storage allows instant access. Plus now you have to consider bandwidth costs and caps most US users have to deal with too and it quickly becomes very stupid to store all your media in the cloud on Google or Amazon's servers

If you believe you need 10TB for personal media storage you're either deluded or a data hoarder.

 

  

5 hours ago, sub68 said:

I dare you to find a cheaper solution than 1.5TB worth of free hard drives.

You can also use a used dell optiplex I have seen 6th-7th gen intel ones for 50 USD

It's still cheaper to use Google Drive because the electrical cost of running your server will be higher than the monthly cost of a 2TB Google Drive plan.

[tim0901]

5 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

It's still cheaper to use Google Drive because the electrical cost of running your server will be higher than the monthly cost of a 2TB Google Drive plan.

Uh, no. Most of these i3/i5 Optiplex style PCs pull ~20-30 watts from the wall at idle (which it will be the majority of the time) according to measurements by people over at /r/homelab. Which makes sense as these things are built for corporate environments and schools, where people are terrible at actually switching their PCs off at the end of the day. If you manage to get one with a T or U-series chip (like a NUC) it'll be even lower than this and heck, a Raspberry Pi 4 barely draws 6W even under full load. But let's call it 40W to be generous.

 

Europe is going through an energy crisis right now - our electricity bills are going through the ceiling, with prices in the UK being up ~50% since this time last year. And yet even here, 2TB of Google Drive costs more per month than a 24/7 40W load. In the US it's even more clear - a 24/7 40W load costs $4.32 per month (at the projected average power cost of $0.148/kWh) while 2TB of Drive costs $9.99 per month.

 

So no, it's not cheaper to use Google drive at 2TB, let alone at bigger capacities.

[Bramimond]

When I was solving this problem a couple of years ago Plex was crossed off the list first, because it costs money. And not only does it cost money, it costs money per user. And the plan was to have many users.

 

So I went with jellyfin and it works well enough. Or at least that is what my users tell me. It's mostly used to host family archives. Photos, video recordings, recipes etc.

 

Not using it myself, since I'm sitting at the source and have more convenient ways to access my media that involve Linux CLI tools normal people do not appreciate.

[sub68]

5 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

f you believe you need 10TB for personal media storage you're either deluded or a data hoarder.

As a photographer/videographer and someone that rips dvd’s NO.

yearly I am shooting video and photo that is like 500gb+ per year. A dvd rip is like ~1gb per dvd.

5 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

t's still cheaper to use Google Drive because the electrical cost of running your server will be higher than the monthly cost of a 2TB Google Drive plan.

Let’s see the point when both the google drive the same as this pc is 16 months on just the pc,hard drive and ssd. (162 usd ) and a dell office optiplex is one of the most silent and energy efficient pc’s I have ever used.

heck the psu is 80+ bronze or gold.

[Colty]

5 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

If you believe you need 10TB for personal media storage you're either deluded or a data hoarder.

I have 2 10TB drives in my Plex server. I'm picky, I want full "remux" 4k/HDR files or good enough 4k/HDR quality that I couldn't tell between a Remux and the compressed version.

10TB drives can be had for around $150 if you're patient and on the lookout. 

[AbsoluteWoo]

1 hour ago, tim0901 said:

Uh, no. Most of these i3/i5 Optiplex style PCs pull ~20-30 watts from the wall at idle (which it will be the majority of the time) according to measurements by people over at /r/homelab. Which makes sense as these things are built for corporate environments and schools, where people are terrible at actually switching their PCs off at the end of the day. If you manage to get one with a T or U-series chip (like a NUC) it'll be even lower than this and heck, a Raspberry Pi 4 barely draws 6W even under full load. But let's call it 40W to be generous.

 

Europe is going through an energy crisis right now - our electricity bills are going through the ceiling, with prices in the UK being up ~50% since this time last year. And yet even here, 2TB of Google Drive costs more per month than a 24/7 40W load. In the US it's even more clear - a 24/7 40W load costs $4.32 per month (at the projected average power cost of $0.148/kWh) while 2TB of Drive costs $9.99 per month.

 

So no, it's not cheaper to use Google drive at 2TB, let alone at bigger capacities.

I don't know where you are getting your figures from but the cost to run a 40W server in the UK would be £9.79 per month (from October onwards), 2TB of Google Drive is £7.99 per month. And then factor in the maintenance costs, setup costs etc it isn't cheaper to run your own server. Hell just read the YouTube comments, it's full of people stating how they've used Plex and its unreliable, crashes, always needs tinkering with.

 

if you're an enthusiast I totally understand you want your own server because it's cool etc, but the video completely dismissed Google Drive as expensive as an easy and immoral way to promote the sponsor and I am simply stating it isn't. It's fine to own a server if that is what you want to do but my issue with this video is that it's misleading and goes against what this channel usually stands for.

 

And 99.9% of people do not need 10TB of storage at their disposal and the ones that claim they do are just hoarding movies and tv shows that they are never going to watch. In fact most people would be fine with the free 15GB that Google offer.

[sub68]

15 minutes ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

don't know where you are getting your figures from but the cost to run a 40W server in the UK would be £9.79 per month (from October onwards), 2TB of Google Drive is £7.99 per month.

Ahh UK makes sense. I guess you don’t see the link the person put.

16 minutes ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

And then factor in the maintenance costs, setup costs etc

The only matence cost is a tube of thermal paste. Setup is free if you have a flash drive. 

17 minutes ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

ell just read the YouTube comments, it's full of people stating how they've used Plex and its unreliable, crashes, always needs tinkering with.

The reason why I didn’t put a plexi subscription is because you should use what ever software you want There is a FOS version of plex but also plex has a forum where you can get help at anytime, heck your on a forum that has a ton of people eager to help.

[sub68]

25 minutes ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

but the video completely dismissed Google Drive as expensive as an easy and immoral way to promote the sponsor and I am simply stating it isn't.

Because google drive isn’t a media server.

25 minutes ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

And 99.9% of people do not need 10TB of storage at their disposal and the ones that claim they do are just hoarding movies and tv shows that they are never going to watch. In fact most people would be fine with the free 15GB that Google offer.

Ok I keep a copy of all the raw video and photos.
But if you back up a phone nowadays I bet you can fill a google drive 15gb.

sure that’s you but a basic Google drive account fills up too fast.

[Middcore]

1 hour ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

And 99.9% of people do not need 10TB of storage at their disposal and the ones that claim they do are just hoarding movies and tv shows that they are never going to watch. In fact most people would be fine with the free 15GB that Google offer.

 

Laughable. Do you have any of your own media? 15GB is like 5 BR movie rips. 

[tkitch]

20 hours ago, DarkSwordsman said:

Someone brought up a pretty important tidbit in the YouTube comments that I was unaware of. Something that happened 3 weeks ago and is convenient timing for Plex to have a glowing ad by a popular tech YouTuber that has used their software for a long time. Never mind that it also helps promote things like Jellyfin that do not store any user credentials or anything by requiring a cloud login to use the software.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/24/plex-streaming-breach-passwords/

you mean the entire section of the video that talked about the password breach? 

 

  

16 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Laughable. Do you have any of your own media? 15GB is like 5 BR movie rips. 

you mean....  1?

 

  

7 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

If you believe you need 10TB for personal media storage you're either deluded or a data hoarder.

Uhhhh, I just setup a 50+ TB NAS Server (~30TB after RAID Z2)....  So, you're just wrong.  

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

In fact most people would be fine with the free 15GB that Google offer.

Excuse me, WTF? Do you know the sizes of the files we're talking about here? Aside from the fact that Google Drive is not a streaming platform that is in any way comparable to something like Plex, you seem to be confused on how much storage is needed for high quality media. 15GB won't even hold a HD Blu-ray rip without being compressed. As an example, I recently ripped 11 Blu-ray discs to add to my own Plex server. They're all HD movies, so not even 4K. 11 uncompressed Blu-ray rips came out to 307GB. Sure, I can drop that down a lot if I wanted to compress the files, but trying to get all of those down to under 15GB would be rough. 

 

14 minutes ago, Middcore said:

15GB is like 5 BR movie rips. 

That's only if you compress them a fair amount. Ripping standard Blu-ray discs usually gives files around 20-40GB in size, depending on the disc. 

[tim0901]

5 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

I don't know where you are getting your figures from but the cost to run a 40W server in the UK would be £9.79 per month (from October onwards), 2TB of Google Drive is £7.99 per month. And then factor in the maintenance costs, setup costs etc it isn't cheaper to run your own server. Hell just read the YouTube comments, it's full of people stating how they've used Plex and its unreliable, crashes, always needs tinkering with.

 

if you're an enthusiast I totally understand you want your own server because it's cool etc, but the video completely dismissed Google Drive as expensive as an easy and immoral way to promote the sponsor and I am simply stating it isn't. It's fine to own a server if that is what you want to do but my issue with this video is that it's misleading and goes against what this channel usually stands for.

 

And 99.9% of people do not need 10TB of storage at their disposal and the ones that claim they do are just hoarding movies and tv shows that they are never going to watch. In fact most people would be fine with the free 15GB that Google offer.

I think you're missing the point.

 

The people to whom building a Plex server sounds like a good idea are the exact same people you're calling "hoarders". That's kinda the point - Plex allows you to access the media collection that's already cluttering up your hard drives from anywhere with an internet connection. If you're the kind of person to get rid of your films once you've watched them, you're not the target audience for Plex. Going to the effort of setting up a Plex server for half a dozen films... yeah no. Just don't bother.

 

To that audience to whom Plex is an appealing option, buying multiple terabytes of Google drive for their massive media libraries is an expensive option. Especially given that, chances are, they already own and run a NAS to store their data on anyway - it's a common thing amongst that demographic. My Plex data is stored as a directory on a NAS that I've had for years for work. When I came to upgrade the HDDs after one died a few years ago, I simply upgraded it from 2x1TB to 2x4TB (RAID 1). Far cheaper to do that than to pay for a separate Google Drive subscription just for my Plex media.

[Bramimond]

7 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

If you believe you need 10TB for personal media storage you're either deluded or a data hoarder.

I'm not exactly a hoarder, but I've currently got about 40TB of data and it's growing obviously.

Of course, everything is also backed up off site.

 

Aside from ludicrous pricing, I'd never want to put my data on SomebodyElsesComputer™.

 

As far as energy prices are concerned, it's not like I have to have it running 24/7. It's fairly predictable when jellyfin could be used, so it's just put to sleep at all other times.

50 minutes ago, Middcore said:

15GB is like 5 BR movie rips. 

In shit tier quality compressed to hell. If you want to have actually good looking movies you are looking more at about 10-20gig per movie, depending on the length. And that's only 1080p. If you want 4K then its four times that amount.

[Quackers101]

amount of storage really depends on person to person and what they are used to.

Used to 1080p? 720p? 360p? like one episode 1080p can be like 300mb to 600mb also HDR? Audio quality?

But for games and software production etc, to doing videos, would think that 10TB is a nice to have or can be needed as for the use of backup too.

for various games you get up to 2-4-6TB, of course could go down depends on which you play and such.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Quackers101

[SinistralFern23]

This video was not very good compared to their other ones. Not sure why Plex got praised at the end. Those basic things are required by law in countries like the USA. That's literally the bare minimum. Also they failed to mention any open source alternatives, I hope they do another video for this type of project.

[Ultraforce]

5 hours ago, NastyFlytrap said:

He's a hypocrite who always does the 'it applies to *them* but here's an excuse why it doesnt apply to *me*' thing

He's said that what he does is piracy and that the way he does it isn't strictly legal in Canada, but feels as a purchaser of Blu-rays that he will do what he wants with them and will face the punishment if he gets one. He's explicitly stated in videos that he shares his Plex server to others, which makes it not a legal back up digital copy.

[gudvinr]

On 9/13/2022 at 5:49 AM, JFTiger said:

I'm curious if he compresses the files to save space. I've ripped about half my DVD collection and am using about 2tb of space.  I've not started on my Blu-ray disks so I expect the usage to explode once I start that project.

If he does, what method to use and what settings.

In general, you don't "compress" movie files because even remuxes (aka lossless copy of disk) already use compressed file format to store data.

That is similar to png images. PNG format itself already contains compression step during save and you won't gain anything if you pack it into archive or compress using ZFS compression layer.

 

What you do when you want to reduce file size is transcode files to reduce bitrate/resolution/etc to create lossy copy (with reduced image quality) which will take less space and depending on parameters can have same visual appearance to human eye.

[AbsoluteWoo]

 

20 hours ago, Middcore said:

 

Laughable. Do you have any of your own media? 15GB is like 5 BR movie rips. 

No, because why do I need to own every episode of The Office or every Star Wars film? That would be incredibly expensive and if you ever wanted to watch newer shows (like Stranger Things, The Mandalorian etc) you're going to need a Netflix/Disney+ subscription anyway, so why not just use them?

20 hours ago, tkitch said:

Uhhhh, I just setup a 50+ TB NAS Server (~30TB after RAID Z2)....  So, you're just wrong.  

Again, 99.99% of people don't need this.

20 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

Excuse me, WTF? Do you know the sizes of the files we're talking about here? Aside from the fact that Google Drive is not a streaming platform that is in any way comparable to something like Plex, you seem to be confused on how much storage is needed for high quality media. 15GB won't even hold a HD Blu-ray rip without being compressed. As an example, I recently ripped 11 Blu-ray discs to add to my own Plex server. They're all HD movies, so not even 4K. 11 uncompressed Blu-ray rips came out to 307GB. Sure, I can drop that down a lot if I wanted to compress the files, but trying to get all of those down to under 15GB would be rough. 

Yeah I do. Sorry to break it to you, you don't need them. If you're a techie and you like setting it up and playing with it, more power to you, but in this day and age you don't need it, and it's wrong to tell people that they do. And that's my issue here, Linus likes to claim he does the right thing for his viewers yet he's completely mislead the majority of them in this video.

19 hours ago, tim0901 said:

I think you're missing the point.

Funnily enough I think you are. LTT has over 14 million subscribers. The channel likes to claim everything they do is morally right, but here they have accepted a bag of cash to promote something to their customers which for 99% of them is a bad deal. I fully understand that the people who frequent this forum are the type of people who want and utilise their own server, but this forum is a tiny percentage of LTT's viewers.

[Spart0n]

I have been hosting my own Plex server on my personal desktop for nearly a decade now and I've put off for far too long getting a proper nas. But how would I transfer my Plex server from one OS to another without just starting over from scratch and give it my media and build it from the ground up? 

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

Yeah I do. Sorry to break it to you, you don't need them. If you're a techie and you like setting it up and playing with it, more power to you, but in this day and age you don't need it, and it's wrong to tell people that they do. And that's my issue here, Linus likes to claim he does the right thing for his viewers yet he's completely mislead the majority of them in this video.

Sorry, but who are you tell me that I don't need something that I own? Are you seriously trying to say that I should just get rid of the DVD and Blu-ray collection that I already own and subscribe to expensive streaming services that I otherwise wouldn't need? I'm glad you have the money to pay for a bunch of different streaming services, but I don't want to spend that kind of money and I don't want to use streaming services for everything I watch. 

 

1 hour ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

No, because why do I need to own every episode of The Office or every Star Wars film? That would be incredibly expensive and if you ever wanted to watch newer shows (like Stranger Things, The Mandalorian etc) you're going to need a Netflix/Disney+ subscription anyway, so why not just use them?

Building a physical media collection doesn't have to be expensive, and there is no ongoing cost to keep the titles you own. It's funny that someone who doesn't understand physical media at all is trying to tell those of us that do how we're so totally wrong. It's hilarious. 

[Ultraforce]

2 hours ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

No, because why do I need to own every episode of The Office or every Star Wars film? That would be incredibly expensive and if you ever wanted to watch newer shows (like Stranger Things, The Mandalorian etc) you're going to need a Netflix/Disney+ subscription anyway, so why not just use them?

There are multiple reasons why one would not want to rely on streaming services solely from the fact that their money is being taken by another middleman before the creators, the fact that they may already own Blu-rays and DVDs from before any streaming service was competent or they simply had poor internet at the time. There's the fact that some collections for movies come in cool packaging like a bunch of Walking Dead and Breaking Bad come in themed cases that look nice and people do collect movies.

There's also people who just don't particularly care for Netflix and Disney + and will consume those shows illegally and technically if one is to do the illegal consumption of media people tend to consider having a local copy to be less morally bad then watching it on an illegal streaming site with a bunch of sketchy ads.

[ToboRobot]

If there were to be a follow up to this type of video, I'd like to see:

A) information about HBA cards to expand storage
B) information about GPUs for encoding
C) open source alternatives