Home Entertainment - Plex and NAS

[Boney M]

I use a HP Microserver 54L. Have 16GB and 3 x 4TB WD Red disks in it.

I have VMWare and have created 3 seperate VM's, one plex, one XBMC and one using Synology on and use the rest for lab study.

Cannot beat it

[vetran]

what about live tv?

I would like a central TV recording box doing that with XBMC & mediaportal at present. But it a bit buggy.

[yasockie]

3 seperate VM's, one plex, one XBMC and one using Synology

Not sure I understand, why would you be running 3 separate things that do the same (media sharing?) are they sharing the same storage? In any case what the diff between plex/xbmc?

[boxingbantz]

Hi all,

Been looking for a few days to put together a new home entertainment / backup / own cloud system. Have pulled an old case and a load of hard drives together and have just ordered a new mobo, RAM and processor.

I really like the look of Plex - anyone using it?

FreeNAS also has a lot of interesting features. Anyone used the two together on the same box?

I am a HUGE Plex fan. I run Plex on my Synology DSPlay and it works flawlessly whether it is on mobile, tv, tablet - whatever you can chuck it at basically.

Also set up accounts for members of my family so they can watch all of my boxsets/films etc.

As mentioned before, with Plex and a NAS, it makes terrestrial TV a bit of a rarity.

[SimonMac]

Installed Plex Media Server on my NAS (WD4100 has a build in app for it), pointed the Movies and TV Show folders and it works fine, however is there anyway to sync iTunes watched status to Plex? I've seen a lot of people asking it with mixed results, but not been able to get any of them working.

I usually play back videos from the MacMini to the TV, works perfectly and means I can sync to iPad etc, however having the ability to stream from the repository while I am away is a big plus and Plex seems to tick all the boxes, however the unwatched thing is a PITA.

I have tried "Enable iTunes channel" but doesn't seem to do anything

[Einstein Jnr]

I just got the Synology ds916+ and run Plex and it works in most cases. I have some home videos shot from my micro 4/3 camera in high res. The NAS struggles with them unless I stream at a lower resolution. I also have Apple TV and can stream Plex through it. The only thing I pay for is a fiver for Netflix - don't have any other TV service and that works for me. Looking to upgrade the tv but oleds are too expensive right now - but that's another story.

[sal]

I have been using Plex for a couple of years now and it's brilliant. But i don't think there is way to sync the "watched" with itunes. The "Enable iTunes channel" simply creates 1 library with the content of your itunes instead of having Plex to scan/recognise on it's own. Your best bet is to dedicate some time and manually go through the Plex libraries thicking "watched" where appropriate. Bear in mind that it's individual for every user on your Plex server.

@Einstein Jnr, Most NAS devices are quite under-powered for video encoding and for Plex to be able to offer seamless stream of any content to any device it sometimes need to re-encode the stream to something the target device "understands". To avoid going for lower res on your home videos you might want to manually re-encode them to something that your target device(s) naively support and add these files to Plex instead.

Personally to avoid this I just opted for a HP gen.8 microserver, swapped the Celeron for Xeon and installed XPenology on it. It has enough ooumph to transocde 2 1080p streams

[VectraMan]

I use Plex, and it's mostly okay. A few things are a little annoying, like the way it's decided one series I acquired is Game of Thrones when it isn't Game of Thrones (and I can't find any way to fix it). I also had a problem with it deciding to add subtitles when I didn't want them. And yes, subtitles were switched off.

You shouldn't really need to transcode anything.

[sal]

I use Plex, and it's mostly okay. A few things are a little annoying, like the way it's decided one series I acquired is Game of Thrones when it isn't Game of Thrones (and I can't find any way to fix it). I also had a problem with it deciding to add subtitles when I didn't want them. And yes, subtitles were switched off.

You shouldn't really need to transcode anything.

If you follow the guidelines here, you shouldn't have issues with incorrect recognition. If you do, just go to the show and click the fix incorrect match option or remove-readd the folder to the library.

The transcoding happens usually when playing on older model TVs that understand DLNA and can play some generic .avi .mpeg files but are clueless about .mkv for instance. And that's where Plex and other media servers shine, by eliminating the need for you to manually transocde your files in advance, doing it on-the-fly.

[SimonMac]

Ok, I have a PMS account which I use on my iPad and the PLEX server, I can view eveything on the server on this account.

I understand I can have another user account connected to my library, but do I need to log onto the server with this account to link them?