Re: Plex
 

You can start with larger drives and add smaller drives with SHR and waste less space than with regular RAID, though, especially if your largest drives are paired. Have you used this to check?
https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator

Re: Plex
 

yeah, I didn't initially read the fine print on that page...
and from the first of the two links in that bit...
So since I started my SHR with two big drives only, I'm pretty sure I'm either stuck to adding the same sizes going forward OR I can add smaller drives as a smaller but separate volume. I might still do the latter for non-movie/show data. We'll see...

Re: Plex
 

I'm looking at conserving space and have been considering backing up the collection and using Plex. Reading this thread has me a little overwhelmed, though. Yikes. I don't know a lot of what you guys are talking about! I guess it will be s learning curve.

Along those lines, I wanted to throw out some questions. My collection is pretty large, so I know I'm going to need a lot of space. I'm trying to figure out first what my setup expenses would be. Am I missing anything I'd need: a server, UHD burner drive, disc backup software, computer, Plex membership? Also, this will take a ridiculously long time to do, won't it? Notice any difference in playback quality?

I've been trying to read up, but I thought some actual users might be able to point out some costs or challenges that I wouldn't think about. Appreciate any help or advice.

Re: Plex
 

You only need a free membership, the Plex Pass adds features that most don't use.

it can be time consuming depending on your server.

I have Plex running on a 10 year old desktop and have never had an issue.. it's all pretty easy once you get a handle on it.

Re: Plex
 

Plex can be very cheap and simple. Just download the free software on your home computer. Set-up is easy and it runs in the background. Then put some movies on an external hard drive, and watch them on the Roku's Plex app. You might want to start out with this and play around with it.

If you're doing a large collection of 1:1 copies it can be very expensive and time consuming. You'll want to set-up a NAS. That's where your major expense will be. The NAS itself will probably cost $500 and up. And the drives will be $100-$200 each.

It'll depend on how much storage space you'll want. Blu-rays are 25-50 GB and UHD are 50-100 GB each. That can add-up quickly. You can use free software to downsize the movies. I'm happy with 7-10 GB (1080p) or 15-20 GB (4K).

If you get a decent NAS, you can run Plex directly on it. But make sure you get one that has enough power to transcode and stream 4K video. Some NAS like Synology have the Plex app right in their software, so it's easy to set-up.

If it's your first time using a NAS, keep in mind that drives will fail. So keep an extra drive handy.

A 4K disc drive will run around $100-$150, and the backup software is free.

Re: Plex
 

Thanks for the responses. That actually helps a lot, especially trying to get a feel for just how much space I would need for a significant portion of my collection. While I don't have as many these days, I'm thinking I might start with backing up my remaining DVDs. Quicker and less initial memory needed. This gives me a better idea of some things to research.

I forgot to ask. Do you also use some cloud storage as backup? Just extra drives?

Re: Plex
 

I set-up my NAS about 10 years ago, and back then the cloud storage options were crazy expensive. I backed up everything to a couple external hard drives. Unfortunately, my NAS just crapped out this week. So I'm glad I had the backup.

But today, you can get 10TB cloud storage for under $100/yr. I just saw that IDrive is running a sale right now. The 10TB plan is $3.98 for the first year (normally $80/yr). I haven't used IDrive, but I've seen it recommended at a few tech sites.

https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/techradar95
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-cloud-storage

Also keep in mind when you're planning your NAS, you'll need extra space for redundancy. I had four 3TB drives in my Synology NAS (12TB total). But that only gave me around 8.5 GB of actual storage.

Re: Plex
 

I set up my NAS, and then use my desktop's various hard drives as backup. I also have an offsite external hard drive that I back up the more important items. RAID redundancy, onsite full backup, offsite majority backup.

When I originally started with Plex, I just used a couple of internal hard drives on my desktop computer. It worked perfectly fine, once I battled through the sleep settings.

Re: Plex
 

To give you a decent reference, my collection includes 2,400 Blu Rays, and over 100 TV series and takes up about 95 TB. Everything is ripped at 100% quality and stripped of menus and special features. The TV Series can be a little misleading since that can be a simple two episode DVD miniseries, or a 10 season Blu Ray series. I haven't ventured into ripping UHDs yet. That was still relatively new a couple years ago and seemed overly complex and tricky and takes a lot more storage space. With the price of hard drives coming down, it's something I should start looking into though.

For the equipment, I built an unRAID server with 15 hard drives. I've been running it for about ten years and started with 15 3TB drives and have replaced the drives to the point that everything is now either a 6TB or 10TB drive giving me a total of 100TB (unRAID uses a single drive for parity). We're finally starting to get to the point that drives are large enough that I no longer fill them as fast as I replace them. I just ordered three 18TB drives which will add another 40TB. I'm hoping to slowly fill these over a couple years and actually reduce the number of drives once we get into the 25-50TB range. I've also replaced the motherboard and CPU over the years to keep up with the modern requirements. It's not a cheap endeavor, but it's a bit of a hobby and I love the end result of having everything digital and accessible from anywhere.

For backing up, it will take a LONG time to rip that much, but it's all in the background and really helpful if you work from home or otherwise spend several hours a day in front of a computer. I added three BD Roms to my computer so I could rip 3 BDs simultaneously. At that rate you're getting 6-10 back ups per hour and can do 50+ a day in an 8 hour workday. I do everything at 100% quality because storage is cheap and I don't want to spend thousands of dollars and put this much time into something only to scrimp on quality, even if it isn't a perceptible difference. You never know what might change in your situation where you wish you had 100% quality down the road.

Plex itself is pretty decent. A few hurdles to get everything configured initially, but it's smooth sailing after that. I've overall been happy with them, but be aware that their support team kind of sucks and they're constantly tweaking things which usually means add a new feature that nobody wants and break something else that gets used regularly. And maybe they'll get around to fixing what they broke in a couple years. I was using a feature they had that offered that backed up all the photos I took on my phone onto my server each night. Then they abandoned that and removed it completely. They've also had a lot of issues with the DVR features and local channel guides for those of us with OTA antennas set up. They're constantly adapting their revenue model to focus more on selling streaming programming and less on what attracted most of us to Plex in the first place, which is to set up a file server to share the media we already own. I paid for the lifetime Plex Pass but they still push things like PPV movies and that package of shitty streaming channels that everyone pushes but nobody watches. Anytime they update the apps on my TVs I have to go in and unpin that stuff so that only my movies and TV shows are showing. Not a big deal, just annoying....but it is more difficult for my parents who don't understand things like that and can't figure out the changes and why there's all this new stuff for them to have to sort through to watch a movie that I'm sharing with them.

I also mentioned the OTA antenna and DVR settings. To my knowledge, that is only available with the Plex Pass subscription and well worth it if you go that route. I have a HDHomeRun 4 tuner box set up to pull in all my local stations. I can simultaneously watch four different streams on four different devices from anywhere, as well as record OTA programming. This has been a very nice feature if you've cut the cord since OTA is constantly left out of most streaming packages. I can also watch local news from anywhere out of town since it all gets streamed to my device. If you do this, make sure you get a powerful processor and RAM for your server.

Re: Plex
 

It'd be nice if Plex would give more control over to music, and allowed for track-based metadata and searching. Plexamp is a great app for listening to music, but it could be so much more if Plex itself would put some effort into the music side of things.

Re: Plex
 

I actually downloaded the Plex app to watch a movie a friend of mine is in.

Re: Plex
 

I ordered a Blu-ray burner drive. I figure I can start backing up some things before getting some of the other things I'll need down the road.

Re: Plex
 

I've started backing up some things and getting the hang of how Plex works. There have been some tribulations but nothing too crazy. Everything is currently on the hard drive of my computer, but I would like to set up an NAS.

I've heard good things about Synology (or at least that's it's easy for beginners like me) and am looking at a few. Not knowing much of anything about this, it's overwhelming. Are there any specs that I need to pay particular attention to? Certain minimums that I should look out for? Any suggestions? I won't say that price is no object, but I don't mind investing in something now so that I won't have to pay later.

Re: Plex
 

The two big processor intensive things I can think of are transcoding and recording live TV. If you're not doing much of either, there's really no need to go too crazy.

Re: Plex
 

Agreed. And you can usually bypass transcoding, assuming your client devices can be set up to receive original quality video and audio. Check those settings to be sure, but it shouldn't be a problem.

I love having a NAS for Plex along with using it as a repository for all my personal stuff, too. Synology is great, IMO, and there are lots of good how-to videos on YouTube for familiarizing yourself with their devices.


I will say... if you go the NAS route, make sure to pick one that isn't too much larger (in terms of empty bays) than what you reasonably think you will need. Try to estimate just how much storage you think you'll use, along with the cost of, say, 2x or 3x 12TB drives vs. 5x 8TB drives.
I ended up with a 5-bay NAS, and I'm extremely happy with it, but that's not ideal for everyone.

Re: Plex
 

I knew things were going too smoothly setting things up. I have the automatic update library options selected, but Plex isn't making the updates. Ugh. Setting this up isn't fun, but I know it will be worth it.

Oh, very good to know as I'm not planning on using it for that.

I've got about 4,000 titles, the bulk Blu-rays, so I'm trying to avoid thinking about how much space I'll need to backup that much. :lol:

Re: Plex
 

4,000 movies will use a ton of space. But Hard Drives are only getting bigger and cheaper, so it's much more economical than when I built mine. I had to go 15 drives because 3TB was as large as they came ten years ago, but with 20TB drives out now you could do a ten drive system and store all your media. Depending on budget, I'd also be tempted to just go five and store what you can knowing you can gradually upgrade to larger drives and within five years you'll have enough space to store everything.

Re: Plex
 

I've been plugging away on the backups and making slow but steady progress. I finally have Plex seeing nearly everything, but the TV stuff requires a lot of inputting. Going through my DVDs alphabetically, I've hit Beavis and Butt-head and a potential delay. They're all individual little episodes 5-7 minutes each. Ugh. I'm thinking ahead to things like Looney Tunes. Double ugh. Does anyone have any tips or shortcuts for formatting or naming? Or is it just a long slog?

The movies are SO much easier to do. Just create the folder and throw the file in there, no renaming required. This task already seems daunting enough without thinking about some of these discs that are looking like absolute time sucks.

Re: Plex
 

It's been years since I've done it. I used some freeware that does bulk renaming. Here's what I used:

https://www.1-4a.com/rename/

It takes a few minutes to learn how to use it, but it's pretty simple.

I forget exactly how I did it. But I probably named all the files 1.mkv, 2.mkv, 3.mkv, etc. Then put them all together in a folder. Then set it to rename everything in the folder "Beavis.and.Butthead.S01EXX.1993.480p.mkv". And have it replace "XX" with increasing numbers. So "1.mkv" would turn into "Beavis.and.Butthead.S01E01.1993.480p.mkv". Make sure you include the year. That makes it easier for Plex to identify it.

Once you get the hang of it, it's quick and easy.

Here's some additional info:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/nam...tv-show-files/

Re: Plex
 

Thanks! That's just the kind of program I was looking for. I know about the naming thing, especially with the TV shows. It took me a bit to get it displaying right because of that, but the TV shows I've done so far are looking good now.

Re: Plex
 

I don't know what the hell happened, because I didn't change anything on my end at all, but I added a couple recently acquired movies to my library and Plex cannot find them in any of its databases. This makes no sense, because one of them is a new copy of a movie I already had in there, that it found without a problem. But now, with this new copy, it's like the movie doesn't exist. I've tried 'obscure' titles as well as popular ones now, and nothing.

I've tried searching online, but I'm not finding any good results. I even followed the Plex naming scheme where I include the IMDB or TMDB ID# in the filename, in curly brackets just as they say, and still nothing. This sucks.

Re: Plex
 

That happens from time to time. Sometimes there's a minor update that breaks the matching. It's usually fixed in a day or two.

In the meantime, open Plex on your computer. Find your movie and click on the 3 dots in the lower right corner. Select "Fix Match" and under Search Options put the IMDB number (including the "tt") in the Title section. That should bring it up.

Re: Plex
 

How do people handle different versions of films on Plex? Are they accessible if you put in the same folder? The PG-13 versus unrated versions of Drag Me to Hell play very different. I'd want both accessible, likewise for titles like Almost Famous or LOTR. Or what about 3D films? I suppose a separate library for 3D is an option, but I wouldn't want a separate unrated or director's cut library. How do any of you handle it?

Re: Plex
 

So, I save two MKV files, one with each version, and add them both to the library. After they get matched to the correct title, they'll appear as one listing only. I don't like that. So I select the option to 'split' them, and it'll create two listings of the same title. At that point, I edit the titles to add "TC" or "DC" to the end of the title, and I change the artwork on one of them so they aren't identical.
Probably not the best way to go about it, but it works for me. Looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/OBntD1X.jpeg

Re: Plex
 

I do the same as Dan, although I use parenthesis around the descriptor. (Director's Cut) (Theatrical) (Extended) etc.

Re: Plex
 

So you put the two different mkv files together in one folder on your computer or separate folders as if they're two different movies?

Re: Plex
 

Same folder. No matter what, Plex doesn't auto differentiate between different cuts, so it treats them as one movie, but just different copies. Using the Split option, though, you can edit the displayed text and images so they appear unique.

It takes a bit of fiddling to get used to it. :lol:

Re: Plex
 

Got it. I'll give it a try when I get home tonight. I've mainly gotten used to it, but there are still some odd things like this that pop up. And I still have one stand-up show that it doesn't seem to want to recognize no matter how I rename it.

I'm glad I don't have more stand-up shows because those don't seem to play as well with the system - at least how I try to categorize. I think it prefers you to call them movies, but I see them as TV since most premiered on HBO. It doesn't seem to like individual entries in TV and wants multiple episodes nested in order to show up in a TV library. I was lucky to find on TVDB that someone had nested George Carlin HBO specials. That was the only way I finally got those to show up right. The individual ones from others are still an issue.

Re: Plex
 

Couldn't you update the metadata so they're matched separately? Or does that db not have different versions to pick?

Re: Plex
 

Plex mostly ignores metadata, and just matches on the main movie. I manipulate all of my media in a different program, so my movies are in different folders, but plex still matches on a single movie release. I think it's because, as far as plex is concerned, it's just looking at Movies, not at individual releases (Director's Cut vs. Thetrical). For example, if you go to IMDB and look up Brazil 1985, there's not separate listings for each movie releases.

Re: Plex
 

But since I believe it uses themoviedb.org to get its data, anyone could technically add a separate entry for a different cut of a movie. I'm not industrious enough to do so, but when I added The Abyss in separate folders, it was able to create two library entries for each cut - obviously someone had added some information for both. That's the only one that has worked for me like that.

Re: Plex
 

The changes they've made to the web browser suck and it make it much harder to organize your library.

Re: Plex
 

I finally updated my Synology to the latest version (DSM 7) and the Plex app is completely different. Took it several hours to do whatever it needed to do to change all my media, so just a heads up if anyone else hasn't updated yet, make sure you don't want to watch anything immediately. Also don't use the version synology pulls up automatically, I have no idea why but it's some kind of beta version.

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If you use Plex, they alerted their consumers they had a data breach. Change your passwords

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They claim the passwords are salted and hashed but you should go ahead and change them anyway. And generally speaking when it comes to them, don't use one you use on other sites.

Re: Plex
 

I just use them for the occasional movie on their free service.

Re: Plex
 

Generally speaking for everything don't use one you use on other sites unless you don't care of it gets hacked... ;)

Re: Plex
 

Kind of a pain getting my server working again after changing my password. Thankfully, there were several helpful reddit posts that explained what to do. Now to update all of the devices that access plex.

Re: Plex
 

I'm glad someone bumped this thread as I had a couple of questions.

Does anyone here do 3D? If so, how do you handle it with Plex? Do you convert the 3D to SBS, use a media player, something else? I've got a number of 3D Blu-rays but unsure how to get the files to play independent of a Blu-ray player.

Also, it's time for me to add new hard drives to my server for the first time since setting it up, and I'm seriously nervous about it. I know the new drives will need to be formatted. Pretty easy to do and add it to my existing server space? I'm paranoid about accidentally deleting stuff or formatting the wrong drive.

Re: Plex
 

What hardware are you using for 3d? I have a Zidoo and just use their built in software. I could never get Plex to display 3d and stopped trying.