Question TrueNAS + Plex questions/comments

[solidsnake1298]

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'm tired of every media corp building up their own streaming service, taking their shows off Netflix and Hulu in the process. I got rid of cable because I didn't want to pay $150 a month for channels and shows I didn't watch. Now we are pretty much getting back to that high cost in streaming service subscriptions!!

So I've resolved to make my own private streaming service! With blackjack! And hookers!

In all seriousness, as the title states, I've chosen TrueNAS + the Plex plugin + Google Drive (my current Internet backup destination for photos and other irreplaceable documents).

I need some opinions and feedback about a couple specs in my build. And some of the particulars about how you all encode your Blu-ray/DVD rips. I already have the software on my Window desktop to rip both. My CDs would be encoded to FLAC.

The parts I've chosen are:

CPU - Intel Core i3 12100
GPU - no dGPU, just the iGPU for Quicksync
RAM - 32GB DDR4
Mobo - Asus Prime H610M-E D4 mATX
NVMe Boot Drive - WD Red SN700 250GB
L2ARC SSD - WD Red SA500 500GB
HDD - WD Red Plus 8TB or 12TB x 3 or 4 (RAIDZ1)
NIC - 1GbE x4 NIC. I only have 1GbE networking, but my switch supports LAG up to 4 ports.

At most, there would be 3 devices streaming (me + wife + daughter). My questions are related to disk space and encoding/transcoding.

How big are your collections and how much disk space does it use? Once you rip your Blu-ray/DVDs, do you leave them as is? Or do you re-encode them to a more efficient codec? HEVC? I'm concerned about running out of space before I even finish ripping my current collection.

I chose the Intel 12100 because Quicksync is supposedly massively improved on Alder Lake from a quality perspective. And Plex supports hardware decode/encode on Intel. From things I've read, 4 cores/8 threads + Quicksync should be enough to transcode from HEVC to the optimal format for three users for whatever devices we are using, right? Power consumption is also a concern. Idle power consumption, in particular. Currently I'm just running Windows shares on an Intel J4205 (Apollo Lake) because of how little power it uses. Is undervolting/underclocking a 12100 viable?

Any thoughts or opinions regarding TrueNAS or Plex are appreciated. Did I overlook anything from a hardware or software perspective?

 

[Tech Junky]

I cut the cord back in 2017 IIRC and started off with a Roku testing the other services at the time there was probably 101-5 of them jockeying for position. Each offered trial periods which eased the detox from cable.

I had been using Plex though for years prior for local media and pulled the trigger on the lifetime pass @ $100 or whatever it was and started building a plan around that. I stumbled across PlutoTV though for that traditional experience of flipping through streams w/ a grid guide though the programming is older it's still a no brainer experience like cable. Plex has matured quite a bit lately though and has an intergeated service of channels like Pluto that allows you to stay in the app instead of switching around. They also added a function to allow for multiple services to be searched within the app if you choose to add them.

My Plex library at this point just keep ballooning between OTA recordings from my 4K tuner and DL's from various places. I stumbled upon a program that monitors shows you add to it to auto download them after they air called DuckieTV. Managing OTA content is much easier than verifying it through search pages in a calendar fashion with DTV. If you want to bind DTV to a torrent client that's an option as well and setting up auto DL's is possible too though it's not 100% on triggering for some shows for some reason so, some verification might be needed to confirm that the content is there when you expect it to be.

As for capacity I started off with a single 8TB drive which was fine until I started consolidating functions into a single box and then I expanded it to a Raid 10 setup for capacity / speed / live backups through mirroring.

Needless to say if you have the space it's not hard to fill it up if you hoard and don't purge things periodically to keep it current due to limitations.


Going into it now though I would have probably opted for bigger drives for the Raid but, starting out you can always pick your capacity before dipping your toes into something more complicated. With 18TB drives running ~$300 it's not a bad deal for offloading data onto them. Though at least paring 2 of them together into a R1 for mirroring would be a good idea for redundancy purposes if you're putting data on there you would prefer not to lose in a single drive failure. The other option would be do a smaller R10 and then have it backed up to a single larger drive periodically. This is all much easier to do in Linux than Windows.

As for the R10 it pushed ~400MB/s+ over Ethernet and no bottleneck over WIFI up to 1.5gbps using a 5GE NIC / 2.5GE AP. Mind you this is overkill due to being a network nerd and liking capacity / speed to match end to end on the LAN. Your average data stream is only about 4-20mbps so, gig will be just fine for 50 devices to stream at the same time. Now, the important thing about media is the streaming device and the formats it can handle w/o needing to transcode the files on the server side. MP4 makes life simple for both disk capacity and cheap streamers. Taking an OTA and converting it to MP4 reduces the size by 80%+ and is pretty universal for playback. I auto convert things to MP4 using MCEBuddy that watches the folders selected and triggers the conversion to drop the size files take up. This usually reduces a 1 hour recording from 6GB to 1GB or less. It also helps with some of the codec issues found in some video files being played back properly.

FLAC on the audio side will take up quite a bit of space as well. I've got a mix of FLAC and MP3 in my music folder as well.


FLAC is nice but, not being an audiohead I can't really tell the difference most of the time. I can sense though that FLAC provides better response on the low / high ends though on some tracks. It's all subjective though.

 

[solidsnake1298]

@Tech Junky

I do have the audio setup to justify FLAC (bottom line of my sig). But my offline music collection is quite a bit smaller than 163GB. For now.

I would be running in a RAIDZ1 in TrueNAS (roughly equivalent to a RAID5). Because my critical data would be on-the-fly backed up to Google Drive, I'm not sure I'm willing to eat the capacity loss of the ZFS equivalent of RAID10.

I do plan on getting the now $120 Plex lifetime pass.

I do not currently plan to capture OTA TV. My current use case for Plex will be as a library of my physical media. So I would definitely be hoarding. Though, about half of my physical media are DVDs (older anime).

 

[Tech Junky]

Well, Plex pass is more geared towards the ota side more than anything for the automated hide and recordings. If you don't need redundancy in the raid and don't want to expand it as needed without breaking it up to expand then go zfs.

I'd you just want the front end then use ext4 / mdadm to do the raid. The perk of R10 is each pair boosts the speeds vs R5 which is just slow. Or take two drives and put them into a R0 and rsync to a single larger disk for backups.