Noobie media server setup

[The Price is Rice]

Whassa hap a nin everyone!!

i am wanting to convert all my blu rays to digital and then stream via wifi throughout my house via wifi. What do i need?

 

Ive seen many people talk about either using an old pc as NAS or using a dedicated NAS box like from synology, WD etc. What is the best route to go? Currently i just have a 2Tb external SSD hooked up via USB3 to my ASUS router but it is quickly filling up. 

 

I am also confused about what OS to use. Ive heard man talk about freeNAS, ZFS, and unraid. 

 

Sorry for the total newbie question, i just haven’t been able to find a thread that has all the answers. 

 

Right now i use make MKV to rip bluerays and then handbrake to shrink them down a bit without noticeably loosing quality.  

[Vulcan_Knowledge]

I dont know much about it, but look into plex, plex is definitely a good option especially if you want to watch content on the go.

[AvocadosGuac]

I have plex setup on a box i found on the side of the road. q8300 and 6gb of ram.

 

Can handle a few streams.

[The Price is Rice]

So does plex act as an os in that case? I thought plex was just an app. 

[GDRRiley]

1 hour ago, Sneakyjap said:

So does plex act as an os in that case? I thought plex was just an app. 

plex is an app. you need to install it over an os. freenas or openmedia vault or another linux distro all all common OS to use with a media sever 

[The Price is Rice]

So since ill be using my main pc to convert and compress files to a more widely accepted format, I probably wont need anything all that powerful right? I don’t really understand the purpose of transcoding on the fly every time you stream if i do it just once. Am I missing something? 

[jkirkcaldy]

Transcoding on the fly is useful for a number of reasons. When you setup plex you can stream from your NAS to a local device just to watch your media. You can also stream to pretty much any device, anywhere with an internet connection. Having the ability to transcode on the fly means that if you wanted to watch an MKV file on your iPhone for example, normally you would need to transcode the file to an .mp4 or a .mov. With plex it will transcode it to these codecs as you are watching the stream. (means you can just remux your Blu-rays to an MKV container and have the full quality file play on any device rather than compressing it)

 

This may be less of an issue if you have only a handful of movies and will be transcoding them from Blu-ray to mp4 anyway, but when your collection starts getting as big as mine, (500 movies and over 5000 TV episodes) you're not going to want to transcode all of that media to device friendly codecs. Especially as there isn't always a one codec that plays nicely on all devices.

 

Plex doesn't always transcode. If your device can play the codec of the video it will just stream it as is. But if your device doesn't support it, it will transcode automatically. You don't need a really powerful cpu for plex either. it is supported on loads of NAS boxes and even a router from netgear. So if you build/buy a NAS and are planning on converting everything before hand anyway you can get something with a low powered cpu.

[The Price is Rice]

Awesome thats very helpful, thank you.  

I do have a few questions about plex now though. 

When i rip with make mkv I always include multiple audio tracks (ie dolby tru HD7.1 and dolby stero etc) and subtitles. Will plex include all of that or will it just default to a particular one and not allow you to change it? 

 

I will eventually get a 4k tv and bluerays once it becomes more standard, will plex be able to hadle that. I know network bandwidth could be a limiting factor as well as trying to transcode that quick enough. Im assuming it will probably have to be transcoded ahead of time? 

 

[jkirkcaldy]

Yes to all. 

 

Plex can handle files with multiple audio streams embedded in the file, it can also read subtitles in the video file too. Allowing you to easily select the audio and subtitles you want either before you start playing the video or whilst streaming. You can set the default language, so it will select english audio and forced english subtitles as a default but you can change this like I said earlier. 

 

Plex can do 4K currently although it should be noted that 4K is much more taxing on the server running plex and not many clients support it. As far as I know (and I'm sure there is probably more) the Xbox One S and the Shield TV will do 4K playback. My 4K LG OLED TV transcodes the 4k to 1080p for some reason so it may not be supported on my TV.

 

In terms of your network bandwidth, if you are using a hardwired connection it shouldn't really be a factor. As the streams, even for 4K Blu-ray. A 4K Blu-ray disc has a maximum bitrate of 128Mbps just over a 10th of gigabit ethernet. Wi-Fi is a different matter and can have so many factors play into the performance, such as the quality of the router/access point. Position of your device and the router, whether someone is using a microwave, how many devices are connected, other Wi-Fi networks around you. It can work fine with the right setup for full 4k Blu-ray quality playback, it can be a little more challenging. It really depends. But I would say that for most 1080p content you should be fine if you have a semi decent network. 

 

Playback of 4k media is fine when your device supports it so it can be directly streamed and won't be any more taxing on your system than a SD direct stream as it is just serving the file. When you need to transcode 4K that becomes a whole different beast. The CPU in a NAS or lower powered CPUs just wont cut it for 4K streaming. 

 

If you are going to be building something as a server and 4K is something you want to be ready for without upgrades, you should read up on the hardware transcoding for plex. With newer generations of processors from Intel (not sure about AMD) you can use the build in GPU on the CPU to give a substantial performance boost. Which should help with 4K transcoding. Alternatively, one of the other cool things plex will is optimize your media. So you can have a full 4K copy of the film, then before you go to bed one night or when your server is quiet, tell plex to optimise the file for playback on another device, you can change the setttings of this too, and it will create a 1080p/720p/480p copy of the file. Then you can select the 4K quality for your 4K tv and for anything else you can use the lower, easier to play versions. 

[The Price is Rice]

Awesome, thanks very much for your help. 

 

I think the only other question i have is what OS to use. 

[jkirkcaldy]

That is completely up to you. You can install Plex on nearly any OS. I run mine on Windows server because I wanted to play around with other things it can do as well. And I am most comfortable with Windows and Mac and didn't have a spare mac. But Linux is a good choice too. Or depending on if there is anything else you want to do/need to do you can install the server on top of FreeNAS or Unraid. 

 

Apart from Plex is there anything else you want to server to do? Do you know how to use linux at all? Are you looking for a project that would be a great way to fill a weekend?

 

If windows is what you know and you don't mnd buying another licence or have an old win box lying around go for windows.

 

If you are a Mac guy go for Mac. (but this can be a bit of a pain to expand storage at a later date)

 

If you know or want to learn linux install ubuntu, or ubuntu server for a lower impact OS.

 

If you want a project or to learn something new, go with FreeNAS or Unraid. There is good documentation and tutorial videos out there to help with the process. 

 

You will get basically the same performance from the all the OS because they will have the same hardware. For lower spec hardware I'd probably recommend Linux, FreeNas or Unraid. 

 

Something worth noting is that there can be some high requirements for FreeNas. i.e. it's recommended that you run 1GB RAM for 1TB storage, but there are people in the forums that are running with slightly less than that. It's also recommended that you run ECC ram but that's a whole debate that you can read up on elsewhere. But it's free whereas Unraid costs about $60

 

 

[The Price is Rice]

I pretty much just need it for media streaming throughout my house. I definitely dont like the idea of having to pay for additional windows licenses especially since im not doing anything professional or business related on it. I dislike mac os, am a windows user and have no experience with linux or anyof its other versions. That being said, i dont mind take extra time to learn something if it saves me $60-100. 

 

Thank you for all your help.