Plex Home Server

[dobbles]

Ok guys, back to the basics for me... I am again looking into this as I have been fixing my storage shortages... I am looking for suggestions for the usenet route. I am familiar from 20iah years ago when using for software, but need to get up to speed. Based on posts here and googling, it seems like Eweka is a good place to start? What are your guys suggestions on indexers?

I was wanting to start simple and manually grab stuff on my own, but I am reading that media is taken down so quick you have to have the automated setups you guys have described in order to be successful. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

[DownInFlames]

It's best to have a couple of providers. I use Newshosting unlimited with a Tweaknews block account as a backup. Any provider from this list should be good: https://www.itproportal.com/guides/t...net-providers/

I have Sonarr feeding Sabnzbd TV shows with almost 100% success. I prefer to download movies manually so I can get exactly what I want in terms of quality. I know that can be automated too but I don't it's one area I prefer to do myself.

I'll PM you the indexers I use since they're more of a grey area.

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by dobbles

Ok guys, back to the basics for me... I am again looking into this as I have been fixing my storage shortages... I am looking for suggestions for the usenet route. I am familiar from 20iah years ago when using for software, but need to get up to speed. Based on posts here and googling, it seems like Eweka is a good place to start? What are your guys suggestions on indexers?

I was wanting to start simple and manually grab stuff on my own, but I am reading that media is taken down so quick you have to have the automated setups you guys have described in order to be successful. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

They do not get hit by American takedown requests since they are wholly Euro based provider, and not part of the American Highwinds Usenet backbone, so their stuff is around most of the time. Like others have said, its a good idea to have a main Usenet account + block account from some other provider for fills OR Usenet account + VPN torrent for fills. I haven't had trouble finding anything I need using the latter combo manually that I can remember though most of my stuff is automated.

Indexers NZBGeek has been great for me, Drunkenslug works well as well. I've used NZBFinder as well in the past. There are some other suggestions on r/usenet too and did a lifetime with NZBGeek 7+ years ago on a BF discount. I would trial a few out before biting again to see what works best these days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki...ime_membership

[Hemi-Cuda]

I rely entirely on torrents for my Plex stuff. Prowlarr is an addon for radarr and sonarr that can search virtually any public torrent site, I have 5 or 6 of the biggest sites setup in there and I never have any trouble finding stuff

[flamesrule_kipper34]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

The two big pieces to upgrade a Plex server are Radarr and Sonarr

Radarr - Movie library management service with automatic downloading and importing into Plex. Basically once you have it setup, you search for a movie to add and it will search through all of your configured indexers to find it at the quality you want, download it, rename the file per your settings, then move it into your Plex library. It will even re-download items once better quality rips are available, so for instance you can have a webrip 1080p movie that gets upgraded to a full Blu-Ray rip once it's released. It's a set it and forget it method for adding movies

Sonarr - Like Radarr but for TV shows. The greater value here is that once you add a TV show, it will automatically download and add every newly released episode to your Plex server

Basically both of those services turn your Plex server into an automated DVR system. The catch is that you need some sort of knowledge of either torrents or usenet, as those are the download options for radarr/sonarr. You also don't really want to just dive in and start downloading torrents if you've never done it before as it's a quick way to get nasty emails from your ISP and potential legal action, you need something to mask that traffic like a VPN

If all of this sounds brand new to you, definitely do a bunch of reading before diving in

Thanks for this, this was really helpful.

I'd love to get into Plex Server and things (I'm familiar with Torrents, but not Usenet) and have VPN.

What are people using for storage specifically? I think this is my biggest concern re: cost. Now that I have a solid 4K TV and Dolby Atmos-supporting sound system, there are certain movies/shows I'd want to get in much larger support. How are folks handling this from a service/cost perspective?

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by flamesrule_kipper34

Thanks for this, this was really helpful.

I'd love to get into Plex Server and things (I'm familiar with Torrents, but not Usenet) and have VPN.

What are people using for storage specifically? I think this is my biggest concern re: cost. Now that I have a solid 4K TV and Dolby Atmos-supporting sound system, there are certain movies/shows I'd want to get in much larger support. How are folks handling this from a service/cost perspective?

I'm using Unraid OS installed on a desktop machine using old parts I had/bought cheap on Kijiji (Plus a SAS PCI-E card for extra HDDs), then 50TB of HDDs I bought on various sales over time. Should last me 5-7 years with that amount of storage and the processor. In this type of setup, with the right case you can scale up the amount of storage as you need it and spend somewhere around $20-22/TB when you get new drives. The desktop parts itself cost me less than $500 total. It is cheaper and performs better than the Synology NAS it replaced but unraid requires a bit more knowledge to setup and run.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by flamesrule_kipper34

What are people using for storage specifically? I think this is my biggest concern re: cost. Now that I have a solid 4K TV and Dolby Atmos-supporting sound system, there are certain movies/shows I'd want to get in much larger support. How are folks handling this from a service/cost perspective?

This is where things can get expensive. I bought a Synology DS920+ and 3 16TB hard drives, in SHR RAID configuration I get about 30TB of usable space with room for another drive down the line. I can also add an expansion shelf to the Synology with 4 more drives, but I don't know if I'll ever need that before wanting to upgrade the NAS itself. I'm not one to hoard absolutely everything, I do regular cleanups of movies and TV shows I'll never watch again so I'll probably be good with the 4-bay NAS for a long time

[cam_wmh]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

This is where things can get expensive. I bought a Synology DS920+ and 3 16TB hard drives, in SHR RAID configuration I get about 30TB of usable space with room for another drive down the line. I can also add an expansion shelf to the Synology with 4 more drives, but I don't know if I'll ever need that before wanting to upgrade the NAS itself. I'm not one to hoard absolutely everything, I do regular cleanups of movies and TV shows I'll never watch again so I'll probably be good with the 4-bay NAS for a long time

I was thinking, of the stuff you have on RAID --- how much of it is vital, and hard to find? How long would it take to download, and replace?
ex; 10TB @ 500mbps, is just a couple days.

There's an opportunity cost here; in being able to maximize that ~48TB of space, less your vitals (2 TB?), keep an active catalog, and just roll the dice?

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by cam_wmh

I was thinking, of the stuff you have on RAID --- how much of it is vital, and hard to find? How long would it take to download, and replace?
ex; 10TB @ 500mbps, is just a couple days.

There's an opportunity cost here; in being able to maximize that ~48TB of space, less your vitals (2 TB?), keep an active catalog, and just roll the dice?

I've got some stuff that was very hard to find and setup in Plex. For example I've got a classic cartoons library with all of the old Disney, Looney Tunes, and Tom & Jerry shorts. Finding all that took awhile, and then I had to manually match almost every cartoon in Plex since the auto-scrapper doesn't work on those short films. Would not want to go through that again, plus I have some photos and other important info backed up on the Synology, so I have no issue spending a bit more to ensure I have some redundancy

[DownInFlames]

Anyone else having issues playing Dolby Vision videos? The Apple TV and LG OLED TV both support it but I get unsupported color space errors.

[MikeMc]

Dumb question. Any way to stream Flames games through Plex?



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[Raekwon]

Originally Posted by MikeMc

Dumb question. Any way to stream Flames games through Plex?

There is but it's more of a pain than its worth IMO. Requires an IPTV source, a virtual antenna program, and a bunch of configuration.

I spent some time working with it and only found moderate success. I would suggest just skipping the Plex for live TV and depending on what you are using to watch just install an IPTV app and use that for your IPTV source. I don't know how well it works with the free sources but there are other options out there as low as $10/month for EVERYTHING lol.

[cKy]

Originally Posted by Raekwon

There is but it's more of a pain than its worth IMO. Requires an IPTV source, a virtual antenna program, and a bunch of configuration.

I spent some time working with it and only found moderate success. I would suggest just skipping the Plex for live TV and depending on what you are using to watch just install an IPTV app and use that for your IPTV source. I don't know how well it works with the free sources but there are other options out there as low as $10/month for EVERYTHING lol.

Stupid question you may or may not know. If your IPTV sub only allows say 3 concurrent playbacks, does/can Plex Pass cheat that in anyway?

[Raekwon]

Originally Posted by cKy

Stupid question you may or may not know. If your IPTV sub only allows say 3 concurrent playbacks, does/can Plex Pass cheat that in anyway?

I'm not too sure, using VLC/m3u I was not able to, using an IPTV app on my TV it was able to play multiple feeds even though I only have 1 concurrent playback.

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by cKy

Stupid question you may or may not know. If your IPTV sub only allows say 3 concurrent playbacks, does/can Plex Pass cheat that in anyway?

Plex pass can't cheat that, you'd have to use xTeve to transcode that on the fly and then technically you can do as many streams as you have bandwidth and transcode headroom for, cuz you are rebroadcasting your re-transcode of the IPTV stream. Your one stream becomes however many you need.

Alternatively you can just rely on the pirate feeds that Mario uses, but the EPG and whether the game shows up is... unreliable.

[cKy]

Originally Posted by FlameOn

Plex pass can't cheat that, you'd have to use xTeve to transcode that on the fly and then technically you can do as many streams as you have bandwidth and transcode headroom for, cuz you are rebroadcasting your re-transcode of the IPTV stream. Your one stream becomes however many you need.

Alternatively you can just rely on the pirate feeds that Mario uses, but the EPG and whether the game shows up is... unreliable.

I'm savvy enough to deal with feeds for all my Jays/Flames games so i'm not at all concerned about that. It's my 'challenged' Plex users that I was thinking of.

I was planning on using xTeve. My server is powerful enough to transcode enough streams, but I didn't want to go down that road if the concurrent limit would be the roadblock.

That's super helpful. Thanks

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by cKy

I'm savvy enough to deal with feeds for all my Jays/Flames games so i'm not at all concerned about that. It's my 'challenged' Plex users that I was thinking of.

I was planning on using xTeve. My server is powerful enough to transcode enough streams, but I didn't want to go down that road if the concurrent limit would be the roadblock.

That's super helpful. Thanks

What you are looking to do is to use your machine as the local Stream Buffer and xTeVe will connect to whatever the IP source is.

If you want only sports stuff xTeVe w/ Lazystream will get you there and isn't too terrible to set up. Though program information in your TV grid won't update until like the day of the games at around noon and the streams don't always work. If you are looking for other IPTV sources, I'd suggest finding a separate program information provider like zap2it(free) for your programming information cuz most of the IPTV guys don't really care about giving accurate data.

[MrCallahan]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

This is where things can get expensive. I bought a Synology DS920+ and 3 16TB hard drives, in SHR RAID configuration I get about 30TB of usable space with room for another drive down the line. I can also add an expansion shelf to the Synology with 4 more drives, but I don't know if I'll ever need that before wanting to upgrade the NAS itself. I'm not one to hoard absolutely everything, I do regular cleanups of movies and TV shows I'll never watch again so I'll probably be good with the 4-bay NAS for a long time

Does the Synology act as your Plex server too?? It's been on my to-do list for quite a while to buy a NAS to build a Plex server. But I've been torn on the various models to get. Are there NAS devices that are capable of transcoding 4K without issues (and host a couple VM's)??? ideally that's what I'd like for my personal use, and would probably limit the resolution to anyone that I would allow to connect to my media server. But also wondered if it'd better to do a custom build, and use an open source NAS OS (least preferred...don't want to spend too much time tinkering to make things work).

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by MrCallahan

Does the Synology act as your Plex server too?? It's been on my to-do list for quite a while to buy a NAS to build a Plex server. But I've been torn on the various models to get. Are there NAS devices that are capable of transcoding 4K without issues (and host a couple VM's)??? ideally that's what I'd like for my personal use, and would probably limit the resolution to anyone that I would allow to connect to my media server. But also wondered if it'd better to do a custom build, and use an open source NAS OS (least preferred...don't want to spend too much time tinkering to make things work).

Transcoding 4K isn't really a thing right now, even with the most powerful CPUs. Plus you wouldn't want to watch transcoded 4K anyway, on a non-4K screen the image will be very dark and muddy without HDR

As for the host, the Synology can be your Plex server, but it would only really be suitable for in-home direct play streaming. I snagged an old Dell micro form factor PC from work with an i7 in it which acts as my home server. You can usually find old work PCs on Ebay with decent processors in them for cheap, I'd recommend that for the Plex server itself if you want multiple transcodes

[MrCallahan]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

Transcoding 4K isn't really a thing right now, even with the most powerful CPUs. Plus you wouldn't want to watch transcoded 4K anyway, on a non-4K screen the image will be very dark and muddy without HDR

As for the host, the Synology can be your Plex server, but it would only really be suitable for in-home direct play streaming. I snagged an old Dell micro form factor PC from work with an i7 in it which acts as my home server. You can usually find old work PCs on Ebay with decent processors in them for cheap, I'd recommend that for the Plex server itself if you want multiple transcodes

Interesting - so I use an AppleTV for all my streaming, which includes PLEX connecting to a buddies media server.

If I buy a NAS with PLEX server configured, using my AppleTV on the local network, streaming 4K wouldn't be an issue? (I do have a 4K TV w/ HDR10 support). That's the main thing I'm worried about.

Don't care about lower resolution when offering access to parents or streaming to mobile.