Looking for Plex setup recommendations

[gus6464]

Anyone running a Plex setup? I just got one of those new Sony Google TV units and put Plex on it and so far it's pretty good but I am now looking for another way to store all media instead of my mac mini which is my main computer. Would building a dedicated Plex server work best vs a NAS like Synology running the server?

I like the interface and remote of the new Sony google tv unit but if I could get something similar by going with an HTPC I am open to suggestions.

 

[Christobevii3]

I run a synology ds413j and use a wd tv live for plex and works pretty well. The nas isn't going to trans code so obviously you need to make your player can support the formats you have. The roku wouldn't do 1080p mkv's without crashing where the wd tv live will (i believe your google tv will work too). So i just use direct play with plex.

 

[whoiswes]

I have a HP Microserver (the N36L) running OpenMediaVault (basically debian linux with a web frontend). It's running software RAID-5 on 4 2TB WD greens. 5.4TB formatted space.

I have a couple of media server platforms running, Plex being one of them. It runs great with native transport, but any transcoding brings the box nearly to it's knees. Otherwise, it works great with my WDTV and Android devices.

So pretty much the same experience Christobevii3 has.

 

[Kaido]

I run a synology ds413j and use a wd tv live for plex and works pretty well. The nas isn't going to trans code so obviously you need to make your player can support the formats you have. The roku wouldn't do 1080p mkv's without crashing where the wd tv live will (i believe your google tv will work too). So i just use direct play with plex.

Are you using Plex Media Server as the uPNP streamer to you WDTV?

 

[Kaido]

If you want to go the easy route, just build a PC box. Plex Media Server runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, so you can pretty much use whatever you want. Buy a cheap RAID card, some big hard drives, and a basic PC box. B&H has a 4TB USB drive for $179 right now - you can remove it from its enclosure and use it internally for some cheap storage:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...Essential.html

 

[ImpulsE69]

Yea you can make it pretty cheap. Plex has low overhead if you make sure to encode your files in Roku "approved" formats. (typically .mp4 and .mkv work fine w/o transcoding).

 

[silverpig]

I've just kept my old main rig around as my plex box. It's an antec 1040B server case from like 2000, Q6600, 4GB ram, an SSD for the OS drive, and 5x1.5 TB WD greens in a ZFS array (like raid 5) running osx. The only thing I've really upgraded in a long time is the video card - the 9800GTX+ got hooped by an OSX update, so I went with a radeon 6870 and can play diablo 3 on it just fine.

I really don't see the need to upgrade anything other than a full swap out of drives, but I'll probably wait until I can get 5x4TB drives for cheap.

 

[Hmongkeysauce]

I run Plex but it is used mainly for mobile devices and when I'm away from home. I converted my main PC into a Hyper V server and Plex is one of the many servers I run on it.

At home, I run a dedicated HTPC with XBMC. This setup works wonders for me as I am able to enjoy my rather small library of movies wherever I go.

 

[Face2Face]

Depends on where you get your content. If you torrent a lot.... Your best would be to build a PC that could handle transcoding. They you should buy a Roku. I have Plex media server in my house running on Windows Server. It's only a Triple-Core Athlon II, so you may want a beefier CPU if you want to transcode multiple HD streams at the same time. I have two Roku's, couple Android phones and 4 i Devices. My current CPU can handle a couple avg Bitrate (4-5mbps) streams at once. It can barely handle a single 1080P movie at a Bitrate of 10mbps though. Roku's are great if you have kids----?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I run Plex Media Server on my Windows 2008 R2 server and stream to Roku boxes around the house. When it works, it works pretty well but the Rokus can be picky with the formats and generally don't play well with MKV. Unfortunately, to get the full 5.1 sound, you pretty much need to use MKV so what I've done is rip the movies to MKV (h.264 with audio passthrough) and then I've enabled transcoding on my Rokus. That seems to work well. Current server uses a Q6600 quad core CPU and it performs well and the new server I am designing will have at least 4 cores and possibly as many as 12.