Plex Media Server - How To Consume Your Media In Style

[macca_779]

With so much media being readily available these days I thought I'd write a bit of a show and tell with what I've done to build a home media server. This will also double as a how to and provide people a bit of exposure with that they can probably already do with their existing hardware.



My setup is by no means anything flash, but it gets the job done really well and is cheap in that for the most part people will already have the hardware lying around. The software is free and/or very cheap depending on the clients you use with it.

Hardware your going to need;

1. A computer to run the server on
2. Drive/s to store the media
3. Devices to view the media (Clients)
4. Networked Home

1. A computer to run the server on.

There are a few different ways to do this, but the idea is to have a machine that is always on running the media server software in addition to any supporting software.
If people choose to use their home desktop to do this thats completely up to them. For myself I went with using an old Dell Inspiron Core 2 Duo Laptop with a busted screen hinge that was otherwise doing nothing. There are also dedicated NAS (Network Attached Storage) options that have the ability to run a media server on them. The plex site lists which ones it supports



2. Drive/s to store the media

This really depends on how much content you have. For me I'm running a 3TB WD USB 3 HDD for everything which can be seen at the top of the above image.
Other options may be a drive not directly connected to your server, but rather on your network somewhere else and in a RAID configuration. This option is fine, but keep in mind network bandwidth. If your server/drive/client are all on Wifi you'll quickly max out all your bandwidth to a point where media might not even run. If you can connect via Ethernet and preferably gigabit you will be fine though.

3. Devices to view the media (Clients)

I'm basing this all around using the Plex media server and client software. I've done a fair bit of research and I find it to be the most flexible with the widest amount of supported devices. A couple of the other options are XMBC and Media Browser but I won't be talking about them from here on in.

Plex supports the following devices relevant to australian users. There are alot more which are listed on the website

• All modern Web Browsers on PC/Mac/Linux etc
• Android devices
• Apple iOS devices
• Google Chromecast
• Samsung TVs
• LG TVs (note 2013 LG TV support isn't out yet direct from LG, but there is a 3rd party option which I'll note at the end)

4. Networked Home
Most people will have a router supplied by their ISP. For a media server its pretty much mandatory that you run it via ethernet. Modern WiFi standards like 802.11ac are fine, but most people won't have it yet. Going wired also reduces congestion on your WiFi for mobile devices as you have to keep in mind that if both the server and the client are on WiFi then a 10mbps video is effectively using 20mbps of bandwidth. 10 going to the access point from the server and 10 going to the client from the access point.

If having your server connected directly to your router isn't practical then another solution to free up WiFi are Ethernet over Power devices. They plug into powerpoints and use your household wiring to hardwire your network. I'm actually using this solution at my property to get to the garage which isn't connected to the house. The bandwidth isn't huge (~20mbps) but its enough and takes traffic off the WiFi instead of doubling it as WiFi range extenders do.


Software

The Plex server software can be run on Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems. Linux is the most lightweight but I've choosen to use Windows for a couple of reasons; namely I know Windows better than Linux, and I find remotely accessing windows is better for me than Linux with the hardware I use.

The software can be downloaded from the plex webiste here https://plex.tv/downloads
Installing it will step you through everything you need to do to get it broadcasting and signing up with plex (not required but allows remote access). Managing it after this can be done from any web browser on or away from your lan.



At the initial setup Plex will ask you to add media to your library. You'll have the following options for media types and each category handles media differently. For the most part each selection is self explanatory, but there are exceptions. Documentaries for example come in both movie and series formats, so you'll have to do a bit of manual handling to segregate the two if this applies to you.



Once the media is added Plex will scan the libraries and attempt to match the media with online databases to retrieve all the metadata. The metadata is provided by opensource providers like. http://thetvdb.com/ for TV Shows and http://www.themoviedb.org/ for Movies. Both these sites are very up to date and will have metadata on 99% of content.

Naming conventions for files is important. Plex does a very good job of decifering what shows are what. But sometimes it gets confused, for example rebooted TV shows and Movies. Different versions will have the same name but obviously are different. Adding the year to these kinds of situations helps plex clean it up. This link explains everything if you get stuck. https://oldwiki.plexapp.com/index.ph...ing_Your_Media
You can also manually fix these cases using the Fix Incorrect Match tool.



From there thats pretty much it. The server with the default settings is ideal for most people, it will automatically scan the media directories as soon as new media is put there and download the metadata on the fly. Its not always instant, but its pretty efficient.

Clients

This is the easy part. From a web browser all you have to do it go to the plex website, log in, and launch the client. You will then see all your media either at home or away. One of the beauties of Plex is its built in transcoders. If your not at home all media is going to have to be uploaded from your server to a client. With most people only having a 1mbps upload speed at home this provides a big problem. Luckily with transcoding you'll be very surprised how well a 1080p video can play when under these restrictions.

All the mobile clients have the ability to set what quality you want. If you don't have a large data quota on your phone transcoding will help significantly. The software is smart enough to know when your at home, away on WiFi and away on 3G/4G. For at home use on a phone for example it will pull the media directly as bandwidth and usage is of no concern. On away Wifi you don't care about downloads as much but the upload restriction at home will mean the content is scaled accordingly. 3G/4G is completely up to the user



This is what Plex looks like on an iPhone. Android is very similar and both have the same functionality.

The home screen



One feature Plex has is shared libraries. You can offer to share your media with friends and the way it works is no different to how your own server interacts with your devices. If anything my friends and I only really use it to see what we have and then download it ourselves. But the ability to watch at anytime is there. Plex does have a premium option too called plex pass. I have it and one of the main reasons I do is it allows you to sync media to your devices. This means I and any of my friends who have access to my server can download content to their phones/tablets for later to save using mobile data. What media and syncing ability is configurable to specific users too. Handy if you have a butt load of smut you don't want your mum to see lol.

On Deck

This feature enables the server to remember where your upto on a show. If you stop watching a movie halfway through, it will remember exactly where you were and regardless of what device you pickup to continue watching it on it will give you the option to continue from where you left off.

For TV shows it will also remember what episode you last watched. Then when a new one gets downloaded to the server or your half way through catching up on a series you already have, it will queue up the next episode ready to go from the home screen.. I use this a lot.



Episode metadata looks like this on a iPhone.



Holding down the info icon shows the whole description of an episode/movie, its rating, duration, etc.



On my 60" LG TV the plex client looks like this. As many people will know streaming to TV's with DLNA from legacy servers has its limitations. Plex does have the ability to stream via DLNA but with a proper plex app you get more capabilities with the metadata and the ability to rewind and fastforward which DLNA doesn't offer.



Google Chromecast

The dongle is all you get in addition to a USB cable and power pack which isn't required if you have a spare USB port on your TV.



The Chromecast has been around for a little while now but only recently available legitimately in Australia. What it can do is basically turn your old TV into a smart TV (they cost $50).
This is the default screen, it goes through a random slideshow of images and displays the time in this state.



The chromecast itself has no remote, rather the way you drive it is to use a chromecast compatible app. Apps like Youtube, Plex and the chrome browser are supported. You can use a chromecast enabled app on any device be it a pc, phone or tablet to basically direct the chromecast what to display. For the example of plex what actually happens is if you were to be watching a show on your phone the server will stream it directly to your phone. When you then select to cast that show you tell the server to send it direct to the chromecast instead of the phone. The phone will take note of the episode progress, but the bulk of the video data is no longer being sent to it at all. You can effectively turn off your phone, exit the app or whatever and the casting will continue to the chromecast. Very handy for a second TV.



Apple TV's work essentially the same as the chromecast does with the Air Play feature. There is no Plex app on non jailbroken apple TVs, so you just use your phone or iPad in exactly the same way as I spoke about with the chromecast. One trick that they do which I find quite nice is that you can use the apple remote to control the show your watching for pausing, fast forwarding etc.


The Plex Theatre App.

This app is designed for people who have computers hooked up to TV's. I use this in my office when hooked up to my 27" thunderbolt display and kickback on the sofa bed.
Its probably the nicest of all the plex clients I use and not as clunky as using a web browser.




In the future I plan to setup a Mac Mini on my main TV that will use the Plex Theatre app, that computer will be my new plex server too with a NAS storing all the media hidden away.


References
Plex https://plex.tv/
2013 LG TV client http://plex.sithari.com.au

[macca_779]

Automating your TV downloads.

I was going to do this as a separate thread, but I think it directly adds to the benefit of the plex server having automatic media detection.

Most people probably get their TV shows from a torrent website like piratebay, eztv, bitsoup etc. I used to use eztv exclusively for my TV shows as I liked the My Page feature which allowed you to keep track of what you had watched. Now with plex, that is null and void as it does that locally for me.

Ezrss. The official RSS feed site for Eztv. For those not familiar RSS feeds are used to publish frequently updated info of websites. When it comes to TV shows an RSS feed can be used to keep track of new episodes that come available. Ezrss does an ok job of this, but its not very user friendly when it comes to setting up multiple feeds that need filtering.

ShowRSS http://showrss.info/

I only recently discovered this site and frankly it shits on Ezrss.

With this site you sign up and add the shows you want in your feed with the pull down window. You also set which quality be it HD or SD of the show you want in your feed. The feed only goes back a couple of weeks which is fine. But if you want a whole show thats been on air for a while, you'll have to do that manually.



Once you have all the shows you have on the go added to the list you'll want to get your custom feed. Play with the settings how ever you want here.



Now that you have the feed its time to use it. I use uTorrent as it is the best torrent client out there and it works with feeds very well.

Add a new feed and paste the feed url in. You can give it an alias if you want too. Make sure DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY DOWNLOAD is selected. This is to prevent everything in the feed from being downloaded, as we don't want that yet.



Right click on the feeds box and select RSS Downloader



Filtering is the hardest part of setting up RSS feeds. Its why using the ShowRSS site works so much better than anything else I've used.
All you have to do is add the show name as I've shown here and put an asterisk after the name to wildcard any other aspect of the entry (namely the episode number).
From there you tell the filer where to download the file to. This is where plex will automatically see it and add it to the library.
The other settings are just what I like to use. The smart ep filter prevents double ups which happens when repack episodes are produced.



Thats really all there is to it. With all this running properly you'll have on demand media where ever you are and when ever you want. When that latest Game of Thrones episode comes out at 2:00pm on Mondays, you can duck off to the shitter and watch it on your phone during office time.. Not that I've ever done that, Ive got a 200" projector in the office for that.

My intent when I built my server was to make it as painless and automated as possible. Its taken a while to get it running like this, so I hope there are people that can learn from my development and improve their own media library experience at the same time.

[seedyrom]

Cool thread.
Funnily enough I saw a link to plex on another forums chatbox. Had it installed Friday night. Was very cool.

There's also a way to get appletv v3's working with it. It modifys the "trailer" app to look at the plex server, so you can point the appletv to see your own media library. I'll try to get that going today and report back.

Cool bananas

[macca_779]

Cool thread.
Funnily enough I saw a link to plex on another forums chatbox. Had it installed Friday night. Was very cool.

There's also a way to get appletv v3's working with it. It modifys the "trailer" app to look at the plex server, so you can point the appletv to see your own media library. I'll try to get that going today and report back.

Cool bananas

Yeah I've read about using the trailers app. From memory your just redirecting the Apple TV to a PC which does all the work. Hopefully we get an App Store sooner rather than later for a native app

[Toddler78]

Cool Thread Macca, but I got to say, me personally, I turn to your posts on this type of things as I find you very knowledgable, and your posts informative. - I hope you havent just stumbled upon this? I have been using Plex for a while now and your right, its has to be one of the best programs out there. On the Samsung Smart TV's its awesome. I also have it running on my LG TV but I find that the LG TV doesnt like it as much as it doesnt play all of he formats I have.

I was also going ask you if you had managed to reroute the apple TV trailer app to accept plex, considering your aliance to apple, as it is something I am also interested in doing. Apparently I read that one of the latest apple TV updates closed the 'plex hack'.

Plex has/is also been developed for xbox one as well

[macca_779]

Cool Thread Macca, but I got to say, me personally, I turn to your posts on this type of things as I find you very knowledgable, and your posts informative. - I hope you havent just stumbled upon this? I have been using Plex for a while now and your right, its has to be one of the best programs out there. On the Samsung Smart TV's its awesome. I also have it running on my LG TV but I find that the LG TV doesnt like it as much as it doesnt play all of he formats I have.

I was also going ask you if you had managed to reroute the apple TV trailer app to accept plex, considering your aliance to apple, as it is something I am also interested in doing. Apparently I read that one of the latest apple TV updates closed the 'plex hack'.

Plex has/is also been developed for xbox one as well

Yeah I was a bit slow to get on this one. I always used a PS3 prior to getting the LG TV last year, so while I knew about the existence of media servers, I never really looked into it.

For the Apple TV 3 work around. As far as I know it still works. Personally I find it a bit to messy for my liking. AirPlay works just fine so thats what I did in the bedroom TV till I got a Chromecast.

I've now got the Apple TV at work on a HD Projector on a closed LAN. I wanted to use a chromecast at work as I'm the only one in the office that has apple devices, but the chromecast must have internet access. The Apple TV doesn't care.

[team illucid]

I suppose it depends on how much TV you watch, but I personally find all the client/server stuff tedious. A laptop with 2 x 1TB drives running into an Amp via HDMI is a damn site easier and more flexible IMO.

[macca_779]

I suppose it depends on how much TV you watch, but I personally find all the client/server stuff tedious. A laptop with 2 x 1TB drives running into an Amp via HDMI is a damn site easier and more flexible IMO.

I watch bugger all free to air TV and refuse to pay for Foxtel with its out of date shows and high prices.

The initial setup of this kind of thing probably takes half a day. But once its running there is little to no user input required. Shows automatically download and catalog themselves. I did the whole laptop connected to a TV thing years ago. I then went to a small form factor media player with a drive in it. The interface on that was rubbish though and I had to manually get media on to it.

After that I purchased a WD My Book World Edition NAS. It had a Twonky Media server on it and allowed me to watch my media on my PS3. Worked ok, but no media art and .mkv files didn't work which pretty much limited me to SD content without having to recode the files myself. I did that for years until I finally made this proper server.

Having Netflix had a bit of inspiration I guess as Plex uses a similar environment. The ability to watch nicely cataloged media on all devices is nice.

[Woodchukka]

Thanks for the info Macca. I will have to try this in the new house. Ran 245m of CAT6 through before the gyprock went up so speed and access points should not be an issue.

[macca_779]

Thanks for the info Macca. I will have to try this in the new house. Ran 245m of CAT6 through before the gyprock went up so speed and access points should not be an issue.

I did the same to my place mate. A lot harder in an existing property but still not to bad.

The outright speed of ethernet shines through when moving media around. More so than just streaming, which really doesn't use a hell of a lot depending on the resolution of course

[lumina ss]

I run universal media server, 5T of hard drives a ps3 a Apple TV 3 x box 1 dlink roku streaming stick chromecast. Hulu amazon prime and netflix. And foxtel which is feeling a bit neglected except my missus is locked into the lifestyle channel

[macca_779]

Going a raid setup for my next server is on the cards. I like the thunderbolt solutions from LaCie and Promise. Expensive though

[team illucid]

The outright speed of ethernet shines through when moving media around. More so than just streaming, which really doesn't use a hell of a lot depending on the resolution of course

But why would you need to move content around - surely the aim of this game is to stream from a central server that you download to - typically then if you need to do bulk transfers, it would be faster to you USB 3 media and walk it?

Don't get me wrong, I used to love Ethernet everywhere and have layed it all over previously, but it really is kind of unnecessary in a streaming world if you are using a decent 'N' or 'AC' router (I can't overload my router even with 2 xbox's running on live, and my daughter streaming movies to her laptop/phone/tablet)

[macca_779]

Using USB requires manual intervention. I guess I'm just lazy and prefer everything to be on demand. I also like having the TV being able to do everything to make it wife proof. No booting up laptops and having unsightly cables everywhere etc.

I also like that all my content is available while I'm away in the same interface as if I were at home

[lumina ss]

Why download at all when most of the shows are available virtually live on hulu