Creating a Clustered Plex Server w/ Linux

[whiteGloveReview]

Hi all, i'm trying to assemble a mediocre-at-best plex server with oldish hardware. Any idea how i would go about this?

 

The idea I have is running the Plex server software on a raspberry pi with two olderish pcs clustered together (the raspi acting as the control computer) to handle storing the data and handling the transcoding.

[jjdrost]

Too much processing can become a problem, you have to pay attention to that.

[whiteGloveReview]

1 minute ago, jjdrost said:

Too much processing can become a problem, you have to pay attention to that.

too much processing can be a problem to what? the clustered array, or to transcoding?

[jjdrost]

transcoding it's still  a raspberry

 

[whiteGloveReview]

1 minute ago, jjdrost said:

transcoding it's still  a raspberry

 

i mentioned that the... "slave" (unsure if that's the proper term) computers would be handling the transcoding.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Don't bother clustering such slow systems, getting one faster system won't cost much and be much easier to setup.

[whiteGloveReview]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't bother clustering such slow systems, getting one faster system won't cost much and be much easier to setup.

with 0 budget to do so?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, whiteGloveReview said:

with 0 budget to do so?

what systems do you have? I don't see a point in using a pi here, just use one of the older systems.

[whiteGloveReview]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

what systems do you have? I don't see a point in using a pi here, just use one of the older systems.

i'm doing that now. i need more horsepower to make it work properly. clustering the old systems should be sufficient for my purposes.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, whiteGloveReview said:

i'm doing that now. i need more horsepower to make it work properly. clustering the old systems should be sufficient for my purposes.

Plex doesn't natively support clustering. How many streams do you need?

 

If you don't need transcoding you can get away with pretty slow hardware and it will still work fine.

[whiteGloveReview]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Plex doesn't natively support clustering. How many streams do you need?

 

If you don't need transcoding you can get away with pretty slow hardware and it will still work fine.

i'm actually unsure if transcoding is needed. i'm basically using plex as a means to listening to my music without having to keep a copy of all my music on all of my devices.

they're all either mp3s or flacs.

[audiocycle]

Have you checked out unRaid? I have installed it on my old pc hardware from ~2008 and use it for Plex and as a NAS mostly. The unRaid OS can run on some really limited hardware.

[whiteGloveReview]

Just now, audiocycle said:

Have you checked out unRaid? I have installed it on my old pc hardware from ~2008 and use it for Plex and as a NAS mostly. The unRaid OS can run on some really limited hardware.

haven't. i've been using fedora and the plex server software for that distro. i might want to.

[audiocycle]

I really enjoyed the experience. I had no prior knowledge of gnu linux based systems and the simplicity of the gui and the quality how-too videos that can be found on youtube made all the setup pretty easy.

[whiteGloveReview]

1 minute ago, audiocycle said:

I really enjoyed the experience. I had no prior knowledge of gnu linux based systems and the simplicity of the gui and the quality how-too videos that can be found on youtube made all the setup pretty easy.

that's fine and all, but i'm just concerned if i'll run into the same problems i did on the old system i'm using. 

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, whiteGloveReview said:

i'm actually unsure if transcoding is needed. i'm basically using plex as a means to listening to my music without having to keep a copy of all my music on all of my devices.

they're all either mp3s or flacs.

If you're only using it for music listening then you really don't need this complicated cluster setup you're proposing.

Your Raspberry Pi should be more than enough to simply serve the files to the client. Hell, I'd even recommend moving away from using Plex completely. Seems unnecessary.

 

3 hours ago, audiocycle said:

Have you checked out unRaid? I have installed it on my old pc hardware from ~2008 and use it for Plex and as a NAS mostly. The unRaid OS can run on some really limited hardware.

I strongly recommend against using unRAID. Seems completely pointless.

 

3 hours ago, whiteGloveReview said:

haven't. i've been using fedora and the plex server software for that distro. i might want to.

Stick with Fedora. UnRAID won't solve any of your problems.

[whiteGloveReview]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

If you're only using it for music listening then you really don't need this complicated cluster setup you're proposing.

Your Raspberry Pi should be more than enough to simply serve the files to the client. Hell, I'd even recommend moving away from using Plex completely. Seems unnecessary.

ok then, how do you propose i serve the files? plex handles this nicely and allows me to play them conveniently.

[lacion]

there is this project that can help.

 

https://github.com/nagadevkrishna/Plex-Remote-Transcoder

[LAwLz]

3 minutes ago, whiteGloveReview said:

ok then, how do you propose i serve the files? plex handles this nicely and allows me to play them conveniently.

What devices do you want to play the music on and where are the files accessed from?

If it's just local access and not access from outside the network, then using a music player which supports fetching files over SMB will be much more efficient and require next to no processing on the Raspberry Pi. 

 

Another option would be to install something like ReadyMedia (aka minidlna). I think that can serve raw audio files to clients which support DLNA.

[Mikensan]

Each plex installation is going to be unique which immediately creates a problem. You would have to modify the installation in such a way they share a database. Because Plex is not designed for HA or clustering, sharing a database may create a lot of problems. Normally a solution (not-plex) would be having your servers sit behind a load balancer and point everything to the load balancer.

 

The best $0 budget is play a movie on whatever devices you intend to, figure out what it is being transcoded to. Then go through your collection and just handbrake/encode it all. Then you barely require any CPU powa. 

[whiteGloveReview]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

What devices do you want to play the music on and where are the files accessed from?

If it's just local access and not access from outside the network, then using a music player which supports fetching files over SMB will be much more efficient and require next to no processing on the Raspberry Pi. 

 

Another option would be to install something like ReadyMedia (aka minidlna). I think that can serve raw audio files to clients which support DLNA.

it's currently sitting on my server and i want my media to be accessable on any device i deem fit, (phone, pc, whatever) that has an internet connection. i want it accessible both in a LAN setting (say, when my phone is on my home wifi) or when i'm driving around.

 

plex works, in that regard but it's giving me issues such as the transcoder crashing and so my media doesn't get played. i'm unable to use the "optimising" feature that it has.

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 hours ago, whiteGloveReview said:

i'm actually unsure if transcoding is needed. i'm basically using plex as a means to listening to my music without having to keep a copy of all my music on all of my devices.

they're all either mp3s or flacs.

how old is this system? What specs? What your doing won't need much system power at all. Clustering won't help here.

[lacion]

i found this that may be of use to you.

 

https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex

 

 

they are using kubernetes which you can totally use in a pi cluster.