Media server (Plex advice)

[moderategamer]

I'm looking for some advice on Plex I already stream my media over the network but up until now I have not been using any programs for this rather simply just using port forwarding which has served my purpose as there is no transcoding involved giving me lossless streaming and uses less cpu power. This has worked for me very well and I have no problem streaming 4k content with latency free scrubbing although most of my media is in 1080p. My problem comes when I want to allow my mother to stream movies to her now tv box which can't have direct access to drives through port forwarding leaving me with one option Plex. I like the features of Plex but I don't want to trancode my media as there is a performance hit and my streaming pc also happens to be my gaming rig for the time being till I set up my dedicated ZFS server. I would like to avoid transcoding all together not only for the performance hit but also for the quality loss, I know that Plex does allow for direct streaming but from my understanding it is entirely up to plex as to whether or not it transcodes media while streaming. So my question is does anyone know of a way to only allow plex to do direct transcode free streaming sorry if this is simpler than I'm imagining as I have never used plex before and I have not had a chance to have a play about with it yet.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

[MartinSnow]

I think this article should answer your question.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250387-Streaming-Media-Direct-Play-and-Direct-Stream

[paddy-stone]

I don't have an answer for you about plex, but rather a suggestion. What about getting your mother to buy/ or buy for her a cheap Android box instead that can stream the movies?

[ultimatemythbuster]

I would have to look it up, but you might be able to tell Plex to not transcode.  I have plex set up on a Server 2012R2 machine with a 4 core Atom CPU and 8GB of RAM, and Plex doesn't even make the server break a sweat.  My real problem is streaming my media over the internet considering I only have 5Mbps upload.

[moderategamer]

6 minutes ago, MartinSnow said:

I think this article should answer your question.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250387-Streaming-Media-Direct-Play-and-Direct-Stream

Thanks i'll have a read of this and see what it shows up.

6 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

I don't have an answer for you about plex, but rather a suggestion. What about getting your mother to buy/ or buy for her a cheap Android box instead that can stream the movies?

I could do but she's pretty in love with this stupid now tv box I bought her.

5 minutes ago, ultimatemythbuster said:

I would have to look it up, but you might be able to tell Plex to not transcode.  I have plex set up on a Server 2012R2 machine with a 4 core Atom CPU and 8GB of RAM, and Plex doesn't even make the server break a sweat.  My real problem is streaming my media over the internet considering I only have 5Mbps upload.

That's something I was wondering about I'm assuming that streaming over the internet is part of the paid package of plex I have 20 up so this intrigues me how much does the package cost?-

[moderategamer]

14 minutes ago, MartinSnow said:

I think this article should answer your question.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250387-Streaming-Media-Direct-Play-and-Direct-Stream

It seems you can turn it on or off but not have it exclusively be on.

[ultimatemythbuster]

14 minutes ago, moderategamer said:

Thanks i'll have a read of this and see what it shows up.

I could do but she's pretty in love with this stupid now tv box I bought her.

That's something I was wondering about I'm assuming that streaming over the internet is part of the paid package of plex I have 20 up so this intrigues me how much does the package cost?-

You do not have to pay in order to stream over the internet.  There are certain features that require a paid Plex Pass, but just look up the features available with a Plex Pass to determine if you need those features.

[moderategamer]

31 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

I don't have an answer for you about plex, but rather a suggestion. What about getting your mother to buy/ or buy for her a cheap Android box instead that can stream the movies?

snip sorry quoted wrong post.

[moderategamer]

6 minutes ago, ultimatemythbuster said:

You do not have to pay in order to stream over the internet.  There are certain features that require a paid Plex Pass, but just look up the features available with a Plex Pass to determine if you need those features.

Really that is a surprise that's good I hate paying monthly subscriptions also i made a mistake I only have 10 up but should be sufficient for single access streaming. I should really have a look through plex's webpage.

[ultimatemythbuster]

2 minutes ago, moderategamer said:

snip sorry quoted wrong post.

I thought something odd had happened.

[Guest]

This is something I've been looking into a lot lately due to limited virtual system resources in a new deployment. From what I understand, Plex will direct play where possible however if the container or codec type isn't supported by the endpoint, it'll transcode it. Eg, MKV isn't supported on Chromecast so it gets transcoded. That sucks for me because a lot of my media library is MKV and the TV has a chromecast.

[brwainer]

14 hours ago, moderategamer said:

I'm looking for some advice on Plex I already stream my media over the network but up until now I have not been using any programs for this rather simply just using port forwarding which has served my purpose as there is no transcoding involved giving me lossless streaming and uses less cpu power. This has worked for me very well and I have no problem streaming 4k content with latency free scrubbing although most of my media is in 1080p. My problem comes when I want to allow my mother to stream movies to her now tv box which can't have direct access to drives through port forwarding leaving me with one option Plex. I like the features of Plex but I don't want to trancode my media as there is a performance hit and my streaming pc also happens to be my gaming rig for the time being till I set up my dedicated ZFS server. I would like to avoid transcoding all together not only for the performance hit but also for the quality loss, I know that Plex does allow for direct streaming but from my understanding it is entirely up to plex as to whether or not it transcodes media while streaming. So my question is does anyone know of a way to only allow plex to do direct transcode free streaming sorry if this is simpler than I'm imagining as I have never used plex before and I have not had a chance to have a play about with it yet.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

What's the exact model of the box you have at your mother's TV? It might support something like Kodi, which prefers local media but can be made to load from the network

 

Edit: I looked it up, I had not realized that "Now TV" was a brand, and that they made just one single Box product. So the question is going to be, what Apps are available for install on it? Any local/network media players other than Plex? 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Windspeed36 said:

This is something I've been looking into a lot lately due to limited virtual system resources in a new deployment. From what I understand, Plex will direct play where possible however if the container or codec type isn't supported by the endpoint, it'll transcode it. Eg, MKV isn't supported on Chromecast so it gets transcoded. That sucks for me because a lot of my media library is MKV and the TV has a chromecast.

Go through the painful task of transcoding your library to mp4?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Go through the painful task of transcoding your library to mp4?

Not at 500+ movies and 1400+ TV episodes

 

Even if I queued them to convert, I wouldn't have the storage overhead available at the moment.

[moderategamer]

16 hours ago, brwainer said:

What's the exact model of the box you have at your mother's TV? It might support something like Kodi, which prefers local media but can be made to load from the network

 

Edit: I looked it up, I had not realized that "Now TV" was a brand, and that they made just one single Box product. So the question is going to be, what Apps are available for install on it? Any local/network media players other than Plex? 

Unfortunately Now TV is a company owned by Sky so there are very few apps allowed the only way I can get plex on to it is by getting in to the developer console and sending the app over the network.