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My Plex server is only 12TB, with roughly 10TB used up. I heavily curate my content too, deleting things every now and then that I or anyone on my server hasn't watched in long time or never watched in over a year. Having over 200TB of content is insane.
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Jun 22, 2016 21:40
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ratbert90 posted:Welp, the network guy that we just hired just shared his Plex library with me. It's uh, well, one of the largest Plex libraries in the world.  Col Needham (founder and CEO of IMDb) has a gigantic Plex server with over 11,000 films in it.
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Jun 22, 2016 21:48
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I would suspect the people with terabytes and terabytes of data are obviously heavy :files: users, and downloading Blu-Ray 1080p rips of movies - size of files can vary extensively, from 700mb to like 10gb.
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Jun 22, 2016 22:33
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Nah a good rip of a longish film is closer to 18-20gb these days if you want TrueHD and other big soundtracks. They're not much smaller than the movies on the original discs in some cases, but storage and bandwidth isn't such a big deal these days.
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Jun 22, 2016 23:53
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Dumb question: I'm hosting plex off a desktop, and until recently, I kept it on 24/7. But now circumstances have changed, and I put it to sleep when I leave the house/sleep. Not like I need plex running when I'm at work, after all. The problem is that I come home, wake the computer, start watching something on plex on my tv, and 10 minutes in, the computer will detect inactivity and start doing hard drive intensive, like a defrag. This, naturally, halts whatever I'm watching on my tv. Is there a setting somewhere in plex to have it talk to Windows and communicate 'this computer is not idle' when media is being streamed?
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Jun 23, 2016 01:40
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ratbert90 posted:The vast majority are TV shows. Well that makes a little more sense. Still, aside from the fact that that's more content than you practically have time to watch, that's so much hardware to deal with. Figure he's got 8 TB drives max, so he'd need to have about 29 of them...plus another 29 for backup (and even then the ~230 TB of primary storage is probably not all upgraded to 8 TB drives so the actual numbers are likely greater than I'm guessing.) Then that's however many towers/enclosures or whatever he's storing them in, taking up a large closet or spare room, using a decent amount of power and emitting however much heat the servers are, etc. That just seems like a nightmare to manage.  OGB posted:So what do we think of these, essentially "Plex-branded", storage setups from Western Digital? I was actually going to post about this after I got home from work. The Wireless Pro is your typical portable HDD with an AP and battery, intended for either backing up photos (for professional photographers) or sharing media with the kids on a long car ride. It adds support for PMS, however it apparently can't do any transcoding. That might be fine in some cases (particularly if the client is a PC) but I find that my mobile devices always get transcoded streams. Effectively that means that unless your clients definitely don't need transcoding from whatever media you have on your device, you may be better off just using any of the other wireless HDD solutions and manually playing the content on your devices with VLC. I mean, Plex is good because of two main reasons: media management and automatic transcoding, so if the Wireless Pro can't transcode then that gimps Plex pretty heavily. The Cloud Pro is interesting. They claim it can transcode 4k streams or 4 simultaneous FHD streams, which is odd because it has an N3710 which is a particularly anemic CPU (1300 Passmarks is not enough to transcode HD let alone FHD.) Apparently it utilizes Intel Quick Sync, which as far as I can tell hasn't actually been supported by Plex yet. If it works, great, but something is off here. I'm considering offloading PMS to an nVidia Shield TV just for the efficiency and power savings. The Cloud Pro would be another interesting alternative. Bobulus posted:Dumb question: I'm hosting plex off a desktop, and until recently, I kept it on 24/7. But now circumstances have changed, and I put it to sleep when I leave the house/sleep. Not like I need plex running when I'm at work, after all. The problem is that I come home, wake the computer, start watching something on plex on my tv, and 10 minutes in, the computer will detect inactivity and start doing hard drive intensive, like a defrag. This, naturally, halts whatever I'm watching on my tv. I think the issue is more on Windows' end, where the background server processes don't count as user activity. You can postpone things though, like defragging and maintenance, which you can just schedule for later on, like some time of day where you don't need to use Plex (like overnight, even if you know your PC will be powered off then.) How weak is your system, though, that it's getting overloaded between a defrag and a stream? If you have your media on a separate volume it shouldn't need much defragging at all in the first place, and periodically reading the disk to stream content doesn't need to max out the drive's transfer rate since you're not reading it at max speed anyway. I mean I can stream from my Plex server while the same machine is transcoding 24/7 (performing the initial archival run) and doing other stuff with no issue.
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Jun 23, 2016 07:40
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With regards to storage/backup, it's very unlikely he's doing a 1:1 redundancy thing as its just a waste of drives. Setups like Unraid can do huge amounts of redundancy with just a drive or two, so it'll most likely be using something like that. Restoring when a drive goes down would probably take a long time though, as it has to rebuild everything. And with that amount of drives, he's gonna have a fair amount of failures over the years. Let's hope he didn't buy Seagate. I still want one of those 24 bay 4U racks that have SAS to SATA backplanes for stupid amounts of storage at a 'expensive, but not ridiculous' price. But then I remember that there's only so much stuff you can watch in a lifetime and I don't want to be stuck at home doing that when I could be doing something better.
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Jun 23, 2016 15:53
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Yeah, I know that not 100% of that content is worth backing up, but at least some of it is, and still, we're talking about dozens of drives and I'm sure many computers that this guy has to deal with. That's a lot of space/power/heat/maintenance regardless. It would probably make sense to share each other's Plex servers, to better distribute the content and the workload. Like, I have tons of movies, but few TV series because those take a lot more effort to extract & transcode from discs.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:25
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Nah you've misunderstood me and how redundancy works. You don't need 1:1 to back everything up, you need a few drives and everything is done similarly to have the PAR system works for damaged files on Usenet. Say you have 4 drives and the system knows the value of a file should be '10', but one of the drives dies. You put it a blank hard disk and it says, well I have 3 fragments - values 1, 2, and 4. That means the missing fragment must have a value of 3, so it rebuilds it. It's a long process, and if you lose a few drives in one go it's really bad news, but far far more efficient than having a 1:1 system.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:54
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As the total number of drives increase you should increase the number of redundancy disks available as the likelihood of failure during rebuild increases. It's not 1:1 but it's also not recommended to be N+1 or N+2 if you have a huge pool
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Jun 23, 2016 19:49
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EL BROMANCE posted:Nah you've misunderstood me and how redundancy works. You don't need 1:1 to back everything up, you need a few drives and everything is done similarly to have the PAR system works for damaged files on Usenet. No no no, I understand how it works, but I'm saying that I don't think he has literally all his content backed up in some capacity, from offsite duplicates to onsite redundancy; I would wager that he has secure copies of the stuff he thinks is important, but the majority (the thousands of shows and movies that he will never have time to watch) is probably at risk because he doesn't actually care that much about the pirated video that he obsessively hoards.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:12
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I'm pretty drat spergy and anal about my files (personal/tax stuff, pics, music, movies/tv shows, etc) and I've amassed a monster collection over the years but I still don't hand a candle to that dude. I can't even imagine what it would be like to house 30++ active drives. I could almost do this now if I wanted to myself but man, the electricity factor alone is such a huge turn off to me it's not even funny. Even if the guy has a huge house and it's no big deal turning a spare bedroom into a server closet, that's still super wasteful in my opinion. I've been running Plex for a good year+ at this point, and I'm just now getting my friends/family added so they can access my library from anywhere. My older brother said this was really badass, and the only way it would be perfect is if it could do music too. As you can guess, when I gave him the good news there he was basically flipping out. And for the record, the first clip every played remotely from my Plex server was the American Gladiators intro flv ripped from youtube eons ago.
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Jun 24, 2016 18:33
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Tyson Tomko posted:I'm pretty drat spergy and anal about my files (personal/tax stuff, pics, music, movies/tv shows, etc) and I've amassed a monster collection over the years but I still don't hand a candle to that dude. I can't even imagine what it would be like to house 30++ active drives. I could almost do this now if I wanted to myself but man, the electricity factor alone is such a huge turn off to me it's not even funny. Even if the guy has a huge house and it's no big deal turning a spare bedroom into a server closet, that's still super wasteful in my opinion. How would you even list that in Plex? Lord knows TVDB doesn't do odd stuff like sports and one off videos.
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Jun 24, 2016 21:54
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Irritated Goat posted:How would you even list that in Plex? Lord knows TVDB doesn't do odd stuff like sports and one off videos. I didn't know this was possible either until I reformatted my computer about a week ago and was installing everything from scratch, and I happened to notice "home videos" when I was adding in my library paths.  "Home Videos" is basically their version of Miscellaneous and so far it's handled everything I've thrown at it. You can even sort them into groups by using the episode formatting/folder structure.  (cropped it to hide my embarrassingly stupid miscellaneous videos) It's kind of fun choosing from the 3 random posters generated randomly for these too. Tyson Tomko fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jun 24, 2016 |
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Jun 24, 2016 23:06
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Irritated Goat posted:How would you even list that in Plex? Lord knows TVDB doesn't do odd stuff like sports and one off videos. I personally have an 'Other Media' share which I set to view by Folder, which I can then look through like I could in Explorer/Finder without metadata stuff. Is useful for uncategorised stuff that's just been grabbed or ripped. E: don't know how I didn't spot the post above... As for the electricity use for hard disks, most systems will smartly power down drives when not in use so it shouldn't be toooo bad.
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Jun 24, 2016 23:21
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"Home Videos" is definitely handy. I have a library of dumb poo poo I've made with my GoPro set to Home Videos, and another one of just videos we've taken of the baby and our pets. Come to think of it, those are actually home videos and I'm not doing anything clever.
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Jun 25, 2016 21:47
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Given that many TV shows / films are going to be  - I can't envision a scenario where you have access to internet able to stream a HD Plex stream but can't use one of the newer torrent streamers.Collecting that much media is definitely a hobby unto itself as it can't serve a practical purpose. Not to mention copyright infringements get you blasted for the number of titles you make available; the guy is opening himself up to a lot of risk. My PLEX storage is a single (shared with other things) 2Tb drive because I can't envision a scenario where I would want to keep around masses of unwatched media, that I couldn't just acquire as and when. Even caching a few seasons of several shows for family to catch up on doesn't lend itself to much used space. The only media that takes up a lot of room comes from borrowing a DVD box-set or something and dumping the VODs without transcodes. Even then I wonder why I bother when I could a HD version, when I clearly wasn't going to pay either way.EL BROMANCE posted:As for the electricity use for hard disks, most systems will smartly power down drives when not in use so it shouldn't be toooo bad. It'll only take a couple of people with access to be flicking through PLEX and it'll keep them spun up a lot of the time. PC builders allocate about 25W per HDD and anything else there will have overheads, so he probably has 2Kwh running at all times, for about ~$550 a year. Not crazy money, but that is the equivalent cost of 4.5 netflix subscriptions per year on the two-screen package. Or about the same price as all the common paid streaming services combined. I don't know why you would bother.
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Jun 26, 2016 21:09
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The MyCloud PR4100 looks perfect for baby's first Plex NAS. I like that you can upgrade ram in the future, and I like the four bays. Is there any reason not to let Western Digital supply the drives? The specification page is notably shy on details; it doesn't say if WD is using their Red drives or something lower-grade.
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Jun 26, 2016 21:27
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Khablam posted:Given that many TV shows / films are going to be Because you own a bunch of movies and tv shows since the start of that media and you like watching stuff without having to have it easily accessible? I mean you're basically saying why buy physical media. This is a way for people that do to be able to easily store and access it. Being able to watch a movie at a friend or family's house without having to think to take it beforehand is pretty great. Being able to thoughtlessly compress and load onto my mobile device either before or in the middle of a trip? Great. Offline access when in areas with no wifi? Brilliant. I understand it's mostly just a way for people to steal poo poo but a cheaper option to a kaleidoscope system has its place for some.
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Jun 26, 2016 21:46
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Khablam posted:Not crazy money, but that is the equivalent cost of 4.5 netflix subscriptions per year on the two-screen package. Or about the same price as all the common paid streaming services combined. I don't know why you would bother. I agree with everything else you wrote, but to clarify the above, the beauty of the Plex system is that it lets you stream things that you can't get on Netflix or elsewhere. If Netflix had 100% of streaming movies & TV shows it would be worth a lot more, but as it stands the entire reason I started with Plex is because most of the media I have on discs aren't on Netflix. You may occasionally read periodic articles about "movies/shows you should watch by the end of the month before Netflix loses them." For example, I have over 100 titles in my DVD queue but only about 10% of them are available to stream at this moment. That's pretty poor availability. Arsenic Lupin posted:The MyCloud PR4100 looks perfect for baby's first Plex NAS. I like that you can upgrade ram in the future, and I like the four bays. Is there any reason not to let Western Digital supply the drives? The specification page is notably shy on details; it doesn't say if WD is using their Red drives or something lower-grade. I'm sure the drives they include will be fine (especially if they're the NAS/media drives) but the only reason to choose theirs or BYO would be price. Go whichever route's cheapest (but do get the high uptime/reliability "DVR" drives if at all possible.) Oh yeah, does anyone know how that NAS manages to do any transcoding with that weak CPU? As I wrote several posts above I suppose it has to use QuickSync but every source I found says that Plex doesn't use QuickSync yet. Atomizer fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 00:26
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My NAS has the Celeron J1800 and it could almost do 1080p transcoding (But totally can't). The N3710 seems to be quite a bit more powerful and has twice as many cores.
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Jun 27, 2016 01:23
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sellouts posted:Because you own a bunch of movies and tv shows since the start of that media and you like watching stuff without having to have it easily accessible? No, I'm saying why have a massive array of storage to store the media you are blatantly stealing, instead of just streaming (illicitly) the same content when you want it? Running costs aside, grabbing newer rips of things usually results in better quality than keeping older rips, with older codecs. The bad streaming programs work just about everywhere PLEX does. Sure I use plex to stream most of the time, but if I decided "you know what I am so indecisive I might want to watch any of around 1200 movies at any time" I wouldn't download them all and pay to store them. Your use to fill non-connected mobile devices is valid and I do the same, but I highly doubt that's a motivator behind that insane setup. Whatever it is, he's probably proud of it.
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Jun 27, 2016 12:10
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EngineerJoe posted:My NAS has the Celeron J1800 and it could almost do 1080p transcoding (But totally can't). The N3710 seems to be quite a bit more powerful and has twice as many cores. But the N3710 totally isn't powerful at all; statistically it's in the "could almost do 720p" category, so I'm intrigued as to how they get 4x1080P out of it; in fact I might consider one particularly with that 20% off coupon, except they're out of stock. 
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Jun 28, 2016 04:01
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Atomizer posted:But the N3710 totally isn't powerful at all; statistically it's in the "could almost do 720p" category, so I'm intrigued as to how they get 4x1080P out of it; in fact I might consider one particularly with that 20% off coupon, except they're out of stock. If Plex finally started supporting Quick Sync then that should allow the N3710 to support multiple 1080p streams.
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Jun 28, 2016 16:56
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Yup, and it's a perfect use case for QuickSync too, since it's optimized for speed over quality.
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Jun 29, 2016 02:26
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Just a heads up for anyone running Plex on their ReadyNAS RN20x series NAS, the 'update available' option when you log in to your server downloads successfully but wont install as a manually updated app, and it will actually totally gently caress your install requiring you to reinstall from the app tab in your NAS config where you'll see there is the Plex app, and the Plex app (for RN2XX)
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Jun 30, 2016 07:47
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The people on the Plex forums say QuickSync won't help at all... that feels wrong but I don't know enough to counter them.
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Jun 30, 2016 14:57
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EngineerJoe posted:The people on the Plex forums say QuickSync won't help at all... that feels wrong but I don't know enough to counter them. Yeah, that's the line I've found everywhere else. It should be something Plex would take advantage of, and it seems like the only way the N3710 can do any HD+ transcoding. So then, it seems like it would be a good idea to wait for someone else to buy the My Cloud Pro and prove that it can transcode 4 simultaneous 1080P streams.
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Jun 30, 2016 17:10
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Atomizer posted:Yeah, that's the line I've found everywhere else. It should be something Plex would take advantage of, and it seems like the only way the N3710 can do any HD+ transcoding.
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Jun 30, 2016 17:52
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Khablam posted:It has Intel QSV extensions, (QuickSync) and it has 4 of them. I'm going to assume that's what is going to be doing the lifting on the device. There's no way the CPU can be doing even one stream, so yes it must use QuickSync. I know, that's what we've been saying. It has QS, it has to be using it to do any transcoding, but all the information available has indicated that Plex has hitherto not supported QS. I would be very happy if this situation has now changed (across the board) though; that would radically alter our CPU options for PMS!
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Jun 30, 2016 18:04
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<paranoia alert> I would be very upset to see that QS use is exclusively locked to this device...
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Jun 30, 2016 21:37
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I'd really like to find a new workhorse for transcoding... Would be nice if QuickSync is being leveraged because it really brings the cost down for a decent Plex server.
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Jul 1, 2016 00:04
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Atomizer posted:I know, that's what we've been saying. It has QS, it has to be using it to do any transcoding, but all the information available has indicated that Plex has hitherto not supported QS. I would be very happy if this situation has now changed (across the board) though; that would radically alter our CPU options for PMS! This and the nVidia shield support seem to suggest no other option than it's running QS. Those are both custom clients though so who knows when/if it'll be rolled into generic PMS.
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Jul 1, 2016 01:50
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This has likely been asked before but I can't find mention of it. How is the shield as a Plex server so far ? I'm thinking of ditching the nuc as a Plex server and using it as a normal low power desktop for my office.
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Jul 2, 2016 18:55
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jonathan posted:This has likely been asked before but I can't find mention of it. How is the shield as a Plex server so far ? I'm thinking of ditching the nuc as a Plex server and using it as a normal low power desktop for my office. There's some limitations. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/221099648-Limitations-When-Running-Plex-Media-Server-on-NVIDIA-SHIELD Short version: 16 gig may run out of space when transcoding large high bitrate files and fail. You should be able to put in a SD card and expand the nvidia shield's space for that. However metadata has to go on the 16 gigs and can't be expanded. Video thumbnails will eat up a lot of space quickly so they tell you to turn that off on the 16 gig shield. You can't install preview builds only what's on the google play store. The Shield can do hardware accelerated decoding and transcoding for h.264, h.265, and mpeg2. Other file types (xvid, VC-1, etc) it will be slower on it and depending on the bitrate may not be able to transcode.
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Jul 2, 2016 19:34
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So I've finished transcoding almost all of my ISOs, to the tune of over 1500 titles.  Now I'm working through the few dozen titles that Handbrake couldn't open (or failed to transcode, either dumping a 0 second file or failing to finish the process over several hours.) MakeMKV was recommended, and seems to be working great to get through the vast majority of the problematic files. There are still a few (less than a half dozen) ISOs that MakeMKV can't open (tellingly, I'm getting a lot of warning messages that DVDFab corrupts files, which is the program I've been using, so this might be the cause of these errors.) Are there any last-resort programs to try to retrieve the videos from these ISOs?havenwaters posted:There's some limitations. Hmm, so it sounds like the 500 GB HDD version is much more appropriate for PMS (preferably with the media on a separate drive) but Adoptable Storage would also help.
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Jul 3, 2016 01:12
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I have been having issues with an older ZBox (Intel Core i3-2330M) not keeping up with newer content and this Shield news has caught my attention. Pulled the trigger on one last night and should get it on Wednesday. So, ah... I guess I'll update the thread with my experience. I already have a FireTV so I am going to have to see which one has the better UI. The Shield may just end up as a Plex server, but it actually seems like it may be a better box other than the lack of Amazon content.
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Jul 3, 2016 18:56
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Alright guys I have a stupid question. Now that I have a baby, me and the wifes frequent movie trips can not exist and I need to watch movies at home and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this to be able to reliably stream 720/1080p movies. In the past, I used a tp link 5ghz router with a standard hdd in a USB 3.0 enclosure hooked into the router via usb. My main beefy gaming machine (not plugged in via Ethernet) acted as my plex server. This worked well enough for 720p, but had some minor hiccups and buffering, while 1080p was pretty much unwatchable. None of this was really an issue as mostly we would run Netflix which would be fine but now that all of our movies are watched from home, I want a more reliable option. Now that I purchased a new stronger router, its not playing nice with my external hdd and wont recognize it so I figure its time to move to a better solution. I don't store a metric ton of videos, so a 1tb solution would probably be enough. I can't figure out the option that would be the best streaming experience. Do I just add another hard drive to my main PC and stream wirelessly direct from there? Should I get one of those WD my cloud things for NAS and plug it directly in to the router and still use my PC as my server? For reference, I have 125mb internet and a usb 3.0 port on my router, as well as open Ethernet ports. I guess I'm just wondering if would be a better streaming experience to stream directly from a hard drive from my main machine or a drive connected to the router. Thanks goons! sleepness fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Jul 4, 2016 |
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Jul 4, 2016 23:13
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Is the router 802.11ac? Wire as many things as possible. The less wireless, the better.
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Jul 5, 2016 01:39
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Whether you should use a NAS or not depends on what kind of devices you plan to use with PLEX and what you plan to do with it. If your Plex client device can play the video files with no conversion, there's nothing wrong using a server. If you need transcoding, either because your device can't play that file natively or because you're using a feature like mobile sync, you'll need horsepower. For instance, I've used Plex with an Amazon Fire, a Roku, an Apple TV 4, and Android and iOS. All these devices have been able to play most movies natively. I have to transcode because I watch anime (using subtitles requires transcoding) and because I have Plex Pass and use the mobile sync (where the server PC compresses the video down into a mobile-optimized file and sends you that.)
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Jul 5, 2016 02:02
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