Go Big or Go Home Plex Server

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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The guys over at PCPer like to watch a lot of "films." And since you can easily share content via a personal Plex server setup, they decided to centralize their collections of "content," so they could share it without having to be in the same room with each other while viewing these "films." AMD's Threadripper 1950X is the backbone of this 112TB beast. And since you can't buy video cards any more, might as well build something other than a gaming box. Also reported in other news, tissue sales have skyrocketed in northern Kentucky.


It's now been several months since our Plex server was brought online, and so we wanted to share with you our build, along with some discussion on why we chose certain hardware and software.
 
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
 
Ehh Kyle TMI, TMI!!

And just a side note, I have my own 'films' collection...close to 20TB worth....nothing to sneeze at, but still damn 112TB...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.
Click to expand...

Plex in my experience is the cleanest just-in-time transcoder for basically any file format you can imagine. Combined with the Android and iOS apps you can watch your collection on your phone without worrying about file formats et all.

I still store all my stuff as files on a RAID5 exposed to the network as a regular windows file share but occasionally I find the Plex Server to be quite useful for watching my content when away from my network.

The "Media Center" esque UI is also quite nice and controllable with an XBox or Steam controller.

You can then add a shortcut in the Plex UI for Steam Big Picture and bam you have a full console-like media experience with minimal setup.

So there's actually 4 components to Plex.

The server (runs in the background).
The client (UI running full screen).
Android client
iOS client
 
These people are awful. I've built more and better for far less. This piece right here shows they are clueless:

"Another issue is reliability. Enterprise-class components are certainly built for reliability, but the used processors and systems being sold have already given a "lifetime" of service. When buying these parts and systems, you likely won't know what types of workloads they were given, how adequately they were cooled or maintained, or any other issues that could affect their performance and longevity. While new components aren't immune to technical issues, we don't have to worry about any abusive past they may have experienced, and we have the protection of a manufacturer's warranty that will at least get us through the first few years."


Give me a break. They are enterprise for a REASON: designed to last, design for punishment, and designed to handle everything that anything a "home user" tosses at them.

I've bought lots of Dell and Supermicro used equipment, swapped out the CPU to the Xeon 2670s when the crash hit and been running my 100+TB arrays (Plex, VPN, DuckDNS, docker images) with WDREDs without hinderance.

Sure if you buy some old X5600 series chips yes it'll be loud, obnoxious, and power hungry. The 26xx series with the right mods can be relatively quiet.
 
DigitalisAkujin said:
Plex in my experience is the cleanest just-in-time transcoder for basically any file format you can imagine. Combined with the Android and iOS apps you can watch your collection on your phone without worrying about file formats et all.

I still store all my stuff as files on a RAID5 exposed to the network as a regular windows file share but occasionally I find the Plex Server to be quite useful for watching my content when away from my network.

The "Media Center" esque UI is also quite nice and controllable with an XBox or Steam controller.

You can then add a shortcut in the Plex UI for Steam Big Picture and bam you have a full console-like media experience with minimal setup.

So there's actually 4 components to Plex.

The server (runs in the background).
The client (UI running full screen).
Android client
iOS client
Click to expand...


Ahh, right. Mobile and embedded device viewing. That explains it.

I've never had any interest in watching my content on anything but my home theater setup, which makes things easier.

In fact, I prefer if my content is never transcoded, and kept as close in format as possible to the source.

I usually use MakeMKV to pull the unmolested video and audio tracks of my choice off of my BluRays and then store them as mkv's on my NAS for viewing. It's a little hefty at 20-40GB per 1080p title, but that's one of the reasons I have lots of storage.
 
it would have been nice to see a few pictures of the actual build, did they actually put any hardware in the case?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...


Plex is complicated... OK

Plex feeds Raw MKVs to all my local clients only trascodes for remote or web views.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...

Plex server is pretty easy to setup. Once you have it configured on the server, you just connect to it from all of your other devices. It supports a myriad different devices, can transcode for slow connections/devices, and can easily be accessed remotely. You could easily add it to your current NAS setup and still use Kodi.

I have a 125TB (advertised) storage, three host Ceph cluster at home with VMs for Samba and Plex.

Zarathustra[H] said:
Ahh, right. Mobile and embedded device viewing. That explains it.

I've never had any interest in watching my content on anything but my home theater setup, which makes things easier.

In fact, I prefer if my content is never transcoded, and kept as close in format as possible to the source.

I usually use MakeMKV to pull the unmolested video and audio tracks of my choice off of my BluRays and then store them as mkv's on my NAS for viewing. It's a little hefty at 20-40GB per 1080p title, but that's one of the reasons I have lots of storage.
Click to expand...

Plex isn't just for transcoding and will be happy to play your content in an unmolested form. It is nice because you set it up in one place (on the server) and then you don't have to do any setup on the clients.

I do the same with my BluRays, HDDVDs, and DVDs but I keep all video, audio, and subtitle tracks.
 
Bigdady92 said:
These people are awful. I've built more and better for far less. This piece right here shows they are clueless:

"Another issue is reliability. Enterprise-class components are certainly built for reliability, but the used processors and systems being sold have already given a "lifetime" of service. When buying these parts and systems, you likely won't know what types of workloads they were given, how adequately they were cooled or maintained, or any other issues that could affect their performance and longevity. While new components aren't immune to technical issues, we don't have to worry about any abusive past they may have experienced, and we have the protection of a manufacturer's warranty that will at least get us through the first few years."


Give me a break. They are enterprise for a REASON: designed to last, design for punishment, and designed to handle everything that anything a "home user" tosses at them.

I've bought lots of Dell and Supermicro used equipment, swapped out the CPU to the Xeon 2670s when the crash hit and been running my 100+TB arrays (Plex, VPN, DuckDNS, docker images) with WDREDs without hinderance.

Sure if you buy some old X5600 series chips yes it'll be loud, obnoxious, and power hungry. The 26xx series with the right mods can be relatively quiet.
Click to expand...

I've purchased used processors and motherboards before and have been relatively problem free, but that's because I'm cash strapped. If I could have bought new and gotten the same performance, I'd have gone new, no question. I have 10 year old processors that perform more or less like new. But if they (or more importantly, the motherboard they were attached to) died tomorrow I couldn't be surprised. Used servers can be a crap shoot. You could be like us that keeps relatively unstressed equipment under 70 degrees, or you buy something kept like my supervisor would like: running right on the ragged edge of thermal throttling with a virtual workload that's always in heavy use. One of those is more likely to fail than the other, and I don't really want to buy the second if I intend to use it for anything more than a test bed.

You can buy used cars with a lot of life left, but a new car is going to have that much more life, plus warranty. At least with a car, you can typically look at it and see what kind of life it's lived. A server will more or less look the same regardless.

On something you want to behave like an appliance, I definitely understand wanting to set it and forget it.

Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.
Click to expand...

For me it is because after the set up, Plex largely disappears. I get a new Roku/Chromecast, I just install the Plex app, log in, and all my content is there. No configuration required, it just works everywhere I need it to. Every few months I just Chrome RD in, update Plex, and continue on. No fuss.
 
DeChache said:
Plex is complicated... OK

Plex feeds Raw MKVs to all my local clients only trascodes for remote or web views.
Click to expand...

Relatively complicated as it adds a layer in between the network file system and the client displaying the content. This is always going to have latency and capacity impacts etc. It adds a whole extra layer of complexity compared to loading a file straight off of a network file system.
 
DigitalisAkujin said:
The most complicated part of setting up a Plex server is getting it to read & list the episode numbers correctly for my insanely large anime collection.
Click to expand...


Use FileBot.

I renamed TB's of shows, movies, music, etc. all to a plex format (it's customizable)

It was the best $15 I spent as I doubled my collection in plex by reorganizing.

https://www.filebot.net/
 
Bigdady92 said:
Use FileBot.

I renamed TB's of shows, movies, music, etc. all to a plex format (it's customizable)

It was the best $15 I spent as I doubled my collection in plex by reorganizing.

https://www.filebot.net/
Click to expand...

That's the thing.... I really really really do not want to use the Plex format. Anime episodes generally contain the subtitle group and file CRC32 hash as part of the filename. I think they let you define an XML file with the episode to filename conversions though? It's been a couple years.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...

It is weird. The only thing I see that might be better with plex is viewing outside the network on a tablet and phone.
 
DigitalisAkujin said:
That's the thing.... I really really really do not want to use the Plex format. Anime episodes generally contain the subtitle group and file CRC32 hash as part of the filename. I think they let you define an XML file with the episode to filename conversions though? It's been a couple years.
Click to expand...


The naming output is 100% customizable. Plex output is one of the options that I chose because it gives me:

Anime Name
Season
Episode Name


You can make this output as complicated or simple as you want. Filebat is VERY flexible

https://www.filebot.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7#p7


If you want to keep the sub group, crc, and what not you can. I don't see a point in it and I rip it out.

I turn

Gundam_Wing_Season1_Episode22_LULZBOT_342134243234211

Into:

Gundam Wing
Season 1
EpisodeName

I have some OLD anime (from [KAA] no less) and it took a bit for Filebot to recognize and reorg the series the way I want it but it handled it without problem. 10TB of media processed in a weekend.
 
Bigdady92 said:
These people are awful. I've built more and better for far less. This piece right here shows they are clueless:

"Another issue is reliability. Enterprise-class components are certainly built for reliability, but the used processors and systems being sold have already given a "lifetime" of service. When buying these parts and systems, you likely won't know what types of workloads they were given, how adequately they were cooled or maintained, or any other issues that could affect their performance and longevity. While new components aren't immune to technical issues, we don't have to worry about any abusive past they may have experienced, and we have the protection of a manufacturer's warranty that will at least get us through the first few years."


Give me a break. They are enterprise for a REASON: designed to last, design for punishment, and designed to handle everything that anything a "home user" tosses at them.

I've bought lots of Dell and Supermicro used equipment, swapped out the CPU to the Xeon 2670s when the crash hit and been running my 100+TB arrays (Plex, VPN, DuckDNS, docker images) with WDREDs without hinderance.

Sure if you buy some old X5600 series chips yes it'll be loud, obnoxious, and power hungry. The 26xx series with the right mods can be relatively quiet.
Click to expand...


Yeah they are making it seem like CPUs "wear out" or something like that. A CPU is not an engine, it doesn't wear out from use.
 
DeChache said:
Plex is complicated... OK

Plex feeds Raw MKVs to all my local clients only trascodes for remote or web views.
Click to expand...

Plex does not play ISOs and does not play my Anime collection correctly. Tried Plex multiple time over the years and it still has issues.

Does it do 4K HDR and Dolby Vision passthrough?
 
Bigdady92 said:
These people are awful. I've built more and better for far less. This piece right here shows they are clueless:

"Another issue is reliability. Enterprise-class components are certainly built for reliability, but the used processors and systems being sold have already given a "lifetime" of service. When buying these parts and systems, you likely won't know what types of workloads they were given, how adequately they were cooled or maintained, or any other issues that could affect their performance and longevity. While new components aren't immune to technical issues, we don't have to worry about any abusive past they may have experienced, and we have the protection of a manufacturer's warranty that will at least get us through the first few years."


Give me a break. They are enterprise for a REASON: designed to last, design for punishment, and designed to handle everything that anything a "home user" tosses at them.

I've bought lots of Dell and Supermicro used equipment, swapped out the CPU to the Xeon 2670s when the crash hit and been running my 100+TB arrays (Plex, VPN, DuckDNS, docker images) with WDREDs without hinderance.

Sure if you buy some old X5600 series chips yes it'll be loud, obnoxious, and power hungry. The 26xx series with the right mods can be relatively quiet.
Click to expand...

They also used Windows 10 Pro instead of a Server 2016 or 2012R2 OS then complain about updates. If you are running a server, use a server OS.
 
Gasaraki_ said:
Yeah they are making it seem like CPUs "wear out" or something like that. A CPU is not an engine, it doesn't wear out from use.
Click to expand...
Everything wears out, it's called entropy and it's a physical law. Heat just speeds it up a bit. You really want to buy someone's used CPU that's been running near its thermal max most of its life?
 
WhoMe said:
Everything wears out, it's called entropy and it's a physical law. Heat just speeds it up a bit. You really want to buy someone's used CPU that's been running near its thermal max most of its life?
Click to expand...

I would have no qualms as long as it hasn't been severely overvolted. (Of course no way of knowing that before hand, but server pulls are usually safe)

In my 25 years of using and abusing CPU's I have never killed one no matter how hard the use before it was so obsolete it was time to throw it out.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I would have no qualms as long as it hasn't been severely overvolted. (Of course no way of knowing that before hand, but server pulls are usually safe)

In my 25 years of using and abusing CPU's I have never killed one no matter how hard the use before it was so obsolete it was time to throw it out.
Click to expand...
You have a point in obsolescence. Back in the day I repaired systems and saw some pretty awful stuff (both from homes, and business including servers), I guess I'm just not the trusting type--of course that was mostly in 386-486 early Pentium days before monitoring of temps became a thing.
 
What do you Kodi folks use for syncing your library and watched statuses across your many Kodi devices?

In my experience, the UPNP library sharing stuff was a crap shoot and having to use a MySQL database to track watched status just shouldn't be a part of any experience. Plex simplifies that and keeps it consistent across devices. I can easily start a show on one device and pick it up at the exact same spot on any device without any configuration or frustration. The external access + Plex Sync also comes in handy regularly for me.

I also am not clear about your issues with transcoding. I direct play to Nvidia Shields including HDR, Atmos, and refresh rate switching without any issues at all. Not to mention that you can use the Kodi with Plex as the media server with a variety of different configurations and still maintain the benefits of a Kodi client with a Plex server back-end.
 
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Fleat said:
What do you Kodi folks use for syncing your library across your many Kodi devices?

In my experience, the UPNP library sharing stuff was a crap shoot and having to use a MySQL database to track watched status just shouldn't be a part of any experience. Plex simplifies that and keeps it consistent across devices. I can easily start a show on one device and pick it up at the exact same spot on any device without any configuration or frustration. The external access + Plex Sync also comes in handy regularly for me.

I also am not clear about your issues with transcoding. I direct play to Nvidia Shields including HDR, Atmos, and refresh rate switching without any issues at all. Not to mention that you can use the Kodi with Plex as the media server with a variety of different configurations and still maintain the benefits of a Kodi client with a Plex server back-end.
Click to expand...


There might be a way of doing this, I have no idea. I've just never seen the need.

I watch stuff in my home theater and very rarely on other devices, not because I can't, but more because I just don't want to.

I have three Kodi boxes, one attached to my home theater, one attached to the TV in the master bedroom and one in the guest room. Never once have I stopped watching in one place and resumed elsewhere, or had a need to keep track of what was watched and what wasn't watched between the three.

All of my watching happens at my home theater system. The box in the master bedroom really only gets used for house and cooking reality shows my better half wants to watch in bed or while folding her laundry.

The guest room TV mostly gets used by my mother in law for Brazilian soaps.

I guess that syncing is a feature I never even thought about. They just sit there and periodically scan the NAS folder for fresh content.

The thing is, once I built my home theater setup, I never had a desire to watch anything anywhere else ever again.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...


Different strokes. I used to be XMBC until my media box died. Switched to Roku's (at the time, they were what was readily available) and Plex on the server.

Recently dumped the time into fixing up Plex (was on an old version because the newer versions ran like ass on my server). It's been butter smooth ever since. To be honest, I didn't realize how nice the UI became when it worked correctly. I rarely had artwork or proper meta data because there's a known issue (I didn't know) that if Plex's cache is on a pooled drive, it can flip out (the way it handles symlinking, iirc). Once I reworked all of that, it became quite nice looking as everything had proper data/art.

Now it's all automated, I don't have to clean up download folders or anything. So when I download a digital DRM-free copy to something I purchased (I know, I'm a terrible person), a Filebot script grabs all subs, artwork, backgrounds, and renames it before moving it into folder for Plex to load into the library.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
There might be a way of doing this, I have no idea. I've just never seen the need.

I watch stuff in my home theater and very rarely on other devices, not because I can't, but more because I just don't want to.

I have three Kodi boxes, one attached to my home theater, one attached to the TV in the master bedroom and one in the guest room. Never once have I stopped watching in one place and resumed elsewhere, or had a need to keep track of what was watched and what wasn't watched between the three.

All of my watching happens at my home theater system. The box in the master bedroom really only gets used for house and cooking reality shows my better half wants to watch in bed or while folding her laundry.

The guest room TV mostly gets used by my mother in law for Brazilian soaps.

I guess that syncing is a feature I never even thought about. They just sit there and periodically scan the NAS folder for fresh content.

The thing is, once I built my home theater setup, I never had a desire to watch anything anywhere else ever again.
Click to expand...

Maybe my household's use-case isn't the norm, but in the days before Plex it would often take checking a couple of TV episodes to remember exactly where we were if we had not watched a particular TV show for a few weeks.

This scenario definitely popped up multiple times for shows that often take the long winter break of a couple of months or so during a season. We also frequently start a TV show and finish it in the bedroom if the wife is getting sleepy. I can't imagine we are alone in that.

I definitely understand the theater part as we spend quite a bit of time in ours for movies and games. However, we tend to do our primary TV episode viewing in other areas of the house.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
The thing is, once I built my home theater setup, I never had a desire to watch anything anywhere else ever again.
Click to expand...

Then, for you, there is no need for something like Plex. That's fine.

I'm sitting at work right now with Plex in another firefox tab playing music on shuffle from my server at home. I do the same through my phone. I've watched TV shows on it on my laptop while awake at 3am on the other side of the world. Or in a window while I'm doing something else on my PC. And it's trivial to set up (unless you happen to have awkwardly named Anime collections or something). It checks a lot of boxes for me.
 
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How much bandwidth does something like Plex use? I'd be afraid of hitting an ISP cap fairly quickly running something like that from my home.
 
MavericK said:
How much bandwidth does something like Plex use? I'd be afraid of hitting an ISP cap fairly quickly running something like that from my home.
Click to expand...

Plex will use as much or as little bandwidth as you set it up to use. You can dictate the external streaming quality and it will transcode to match your settings.
 
I really like Plex, I use it to be able watch anything on my server any where in my home or out side of it. I have Plex on my parents smart TVs so they can stream the movies I own and it's easy they can use it with out calling me lol. Now in my theater I use Kodi as my front end. Have it linked to lanch from my Logitech smart remote over Bluetooth and works great. Also Kodi bitstreams great. Where I have tried with Plex and haven't gotten it to work right. Everything is loaded on my server with mkvmaker with best picture and best sound track. I want bitstream for Atmos and dtsx , have a full 7.1.4 setup. If I could get the bitstream working properly I would probably switch to Plex only.
 
Makeroflostsouls said:
I really like Plex, I use it to be able watch anything on my server any where in my home or out side of it. I have Plex on my parents smart TVs so they can stream the movies I own and it's easy they can use it with out calling me lol. Now in my theater I use Kodi as my front end. Have it linked to lanch from my Logitech smart remote over Bluetooth and works great. Also Kodi bitstreams great. Where I have tried with Plex and haven't gotten it to work right. Everything is loaded on my server with mkvmaker with best picture and best sound track. I want bitstream for Atmos and dtsx , have a full 7.1.4 setup. If I could get the bitstream working properly I would probably switch to Plex only.
Click to expand...

What device are you using?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...

For me I could browse file names and play what I wanted to. My kids on the other hand can grab the remote, go to Kids Movies and choose what they want to watch. On TV shows it gives the episode title and info about the episode.
 
Fleat said:
What device are you using?
Click to expand...

Theater is running a HTPC with 1060 gtx and Kodi, upstairs TV has the Plex app built in but I usually use the Xbox one for Plex play back as it's hard lined. Tv in the bedroom is on a 4k Roku premium on 5g and work's great, can stream lossless quality with no issues over the wireless. Parents have a Samsung smart TV with the app built in, it's an older tv 4 years old or so now. Streamed from my house did fine but wasn't but 720p as their tv is on the far side of there house and my upload speed is only 20. Played fine and fast , but just wasn't super clear. I have had pretty good luck with Plex.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.

Seems much more streamlined and functional that the complicated behemoth that is Plex.

Personally I have my 120TB ZFS-based NAS in my basement. It shares my media folder via NFS to my three Kodi boxes and every desktop in the house. Simple, works.
Click to expand...

Remote access. I can go on vacation and access my PLEX server. Friends and family can access it from their homes with almost zero effort. Nearly every device has a PLEX app and they just make an account and I add them as a friend. I like it a lot, and felt it was worth the $150 for the lifetime sub (they've since dropped the price, oh well).

I pay to get the newer features faster + access to all apps on all devices (I share my login w/ family so they can access all the apps without paying...)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood the need for something like Plex.

Why not just have a MASS and play files remotely off of networked storage, using Kodi or some similar local software.
Click to expand...
Blazestorm said:
Remote access. I can go on vacation and access my PLEX server. Friends and family can access it from their homes with almost zero effort. Nearly every device has a PLEX app and they just make an account and I add them as a friend. I like it a lot, and felt it was worth the $150 for the lifetime sub (they've since dropped the price, oh well).

I pay to get the newer features faster + access to all apps on all devices (I share my login w/ family so they can access all the apps without paying...)
Click to expand...
Everything this guy just said plus the fact that you are using untapped CPU potential of the server to re-encode the file ON THE FLY. Sure, you can get a Kodi app for many devices, but what happens when the device it is installed on doesn't have the right codec for playback or the media itself will likely choke the device?

Examples where Plex shines over just plain Kodi:

1. You have a bunch of movies in h265 format in 4K resolution stored on your server. All the phones, tablets, Android/Apple TV boxes, Roku's, Chromecasts, etc. in the household are extremely likely to choke trying to process that file as you play it over the network. Some of the devices may even refuse to play the file extension such as mkv. Run the Plex app and the server will re-encode it on the fly to something the device can play like a generic mp4 file.

2. Your at work on lunch break, at a hotel for the night, or just chilling at your friend's house. For the sake of argument, assume you already own the media you want to enjoy and don't want to pay for some other streaming service or even re-download it to your device again. Your choice of connection is shitty local Wi-Fi or equally spotty 4G that may even be throttled or bandwidth capped. HD resolution and 7.1 Audio isn't entirely necessary when watching on your 5" phone screen, especially when you don't want to deal with buffering. Run your Plex app and the media could be streamed in 2ch audio, less than 720p resolution, and eat up less than 2mbps of bandwidth.

3. You know that really old stuff you downloaded in the wild west times of the early days of the broadband era? The movies or rare shows you still have on your drive that you can't find newer DVD/Blu-ray versions of? That awesome show that was encoded in some dumb as fuck codec by someone on Napster/Limewire/Bearshare/Kazaa that hasn't been used since 2001 (e.g. realplayer or similar)? Don't worry, Plex probably has those near extinct codecs in it's repository, will download it to the server automatically, and will make it play on any devices with the plex app by re-encoding it.
 
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I wish I could get my plex server available outside my network.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't....
 
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