It is a bit confusing and hard to untangle. There is CPU and GPU transcoding. From my experience (running Plex on Linux for 7 or 8 years) I can tell you CPU transcoding does not work with Ryzen, GPU transcoding does work with Nvidia. That’s all I can tell you though, because that’s the hardware I have.
I’m running basically what you’re describing on an i5 intel nuc, which basically the same as the better beelink minipc’s and it works just fine. I don’t think I’d try it on the super cheap ones with 2-4 cores, but anything equivalent to a core i3 or better should be fine.
Yeah, this. It ought to handle all of them no problem. If you run low on RAM (doubtful), you should switch from Windows to Linux, but you’re probably fine with 16GB.
Got it all up and running, graphs on plex dash show system memory at 45%. I can’t see any difference with how plex is performing, so all happy. Thanks!
A guy gave a speech or something at some point in the past that said some stuff kinda like: ask not “why did you make this thing”, but “why did you not make this thing?”
I’m on emby, I like it and just feels more streamlined I guess. I really liked Plex years ago, but sitting on the forums and seeing people ask for basic expected features (like using the mouse to navigate instead of the keyboard) for their desktop player instead of adding tv streaming and I think the response was “no” and “if you don’t like it, you can compile it yourself”.
Also my crappy ds222j or whatever it is just can’t handle Plex (I had a hp microserver before).
I run Plex for my main system but have Jellyfin installed to keep up to date with its progress.
I gave up on Emby pretty quickly but never went back to try it again, maybe it’s better now, but if I wanted an alternative to plex i’d stick with Jellyfin because it’s open source and community run.
Do people download, store, wait, watch or not watch and then after a while delete? Storage is cheap and I’m even collecting some movies or shows knowing I will never watch them.
E.g. highly rated old mono film, or it got lots of awards but I totally don’t care about the topic. Or a few childhood cartoons, which I’ll probably never watch again.
I only delete faulty data or when getting a higher quality/remastered version etc.
On my server, people don’t have access to delete, so content tends to either fall into the category of “rewatchable” (classics, series, Oscar winners, etc) and “everything else.” Even a given year’s really popular Oscar winners will stop being watched after a period of time, and odds are good that nobody will watch it ever again. When is the last time someone with access to your server watched The Color of Water or The Life of Pi?
Storage may be cheap, but downloading is cheaper. There’s nothing I’ve gotten that can’t be re-gotten.
Libraries do the same thing with books, it’s called “weeding.” People get up in arms about the idea that a library would voluntarily discard a book until they learn that they’re getting rid of titles like “An Expert’s Guide to Windows NT.” The librarian’s response? If you like a book, check it out. Titles that are borrowed don’t get weeded.
Am I missing out by not hunting for the perfect deal on an old Xeon or something off of eBay? I’m not really familiar with server components, and I don’t know to what extent I would benefit from features like ECC RAM.
I run a couple of dedicated linux servers on commodity hardware and they’ve been working well for several years. It’d be cool to have ECC RAM but not worth a bunch of money or effort IMO. Maybe that’s different on windows but I doubt it.
My main concern is buying the motherboard, because from what I’ve heard those will fail before the CPU, so I’d be best served getting a new one. But a new motherboard for, say, a ~7 year old server CPU that fits in a tower case seems like a complicated proposition, as well as finding a compatible cooler
I’d pick up a NOS or tested used board on eBay. Make sure to tweak your search terms to exclude broken and parts systems, look specifically for ATX form factor boards from 99.5% and higher feedback sellers and you should be fine.
EBay has a ton of retired server hardware that’s in more than good enough condition for long term use by a home user. Non specialized form factor stuff is a smaller subset, but it’s out there in good quantities.
Also, although it would work great, the last thing I can imagine would be buying a new board for an old server CPU from Newegg, etc. The pricing for new server hardware, regardless of generation, is quite steep.
Yeah I’ve been consistently tempted to check out used server components because I know that there’s some great performance to be had there for the price. Thinking that I had to buy a new board is what ultimately put me off my search, since the whole point of going used is to save money haha. If I can be reasonably certain that a given used mobo will last me for a few years then I’d be very interested in checking that out. Thanks!
Real world actual difference? No, not much. The big benefit is in the updating of all the software. I run Plex, sonarr, radarr, jackett, qbittorent, Grafana, Prometheus, blackbox, nginx, and a few other Docker containers on a pretty plain Ubuntu server. One command to update the OS, another to pull new containers, a periodic reboot for the OS changes and Robert is your mother’s brother. Way easier than running all software independently on a VM.
Edit: oh, and suffer some type of catastrophic issue or have a software update go sideways? You are 30 minutes away from just reinstalling the OS, add docker and reapply your docker-compose script.
I backup all my configs and their data daily. Last time I had to migrate hosts it took me 30 minutes of actual work to migrate over a dozen various self hosted apps, GitLab and Plex included.
I appreciate everything you’re saying. Docker has only been in my toolbox for a month or two but I’ve had a lot of success so far in standing up new things using it. Now that I understand it better, I’m reassessing the things I’ve run in KVM for years and debating if it makes sense to switch any of them to containers. I’ve already moved some containers around so I can see the simplicity/convenience of it.
It sounds like, from the feedback I’ve gotten in this thread, that there’s no significant functional/performance difference between the two. It’s just going to be a matter of what works best for me.
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