Getting Plex installed…
Get your media server running in three steps, then fill it with media booty!
Plex can be installed on all kinds of devices – Linux, Mac and Windows machines as well as various NAS boxes (consumer devices as well as homespun efforts using tools such as FreeNAS and unRAID). The download page at www.plex.tv/en-gb/media-serverdownloads provides DEB and RPM packages, and there’s an official Docker image too (which we’ll look at later at running via OpenMediaVault). The simple walkthrough below will get you started on Ubuntu, and the idea is the same for Fedora. There’s an unofficial AUR package for Arch-based distros too. It’s worth turning remote access off when prompted by the setup wizard. You can always turn it on again later.
In addition, if the automagic port forwarding works out of the box there’s a chance your Plex instance could be co-opted by someone else.
To avoid painful rescanning later, we’d recommend taking some time now to ensure your media directories are organised. Plex works with libraries, where each library indexes media from one or more physical directories. To start with, you might have Music, Film and Television libraries, and these types of media should all live in separate directories, and have their own heirarchy beneath them.
Plex can handle a number of different file naming and placing schemes, as long as they’re consistent. For best results TV shows should have each season in a separate directory, for example TV/my. favourite.show/season.01/show.s01e01. mkv. Individual films can exist in their own directory – which keeps things tidy if they’re divided into parts or have extra resources such as subtitles or artwork, just ensure the Local Media Assets source is selected in the Agents section in Settings to use these – or not if they’re just single files. Plex recommends music directories be sorted by Artist and then Album, and named with the track number and title, for example Music/The Lemonheads/Come on Feel the Lemonheads/04 – Down about it.flac. Compilations should be placed in a Various Artists folder and each track should have the Album Artist ID3 tag set likewise.
There is some degree of flexibility though, so if you have a different (and mostly sane) scheme in place then Plex will probably manage fine. We let it chew through a couple of terabytes of our media collection (not all of which had complete or accurate tags, and some of it was encoded many years ago in all kinds of peculiar approximations of various multimedia formats) sorted by genre and album, and it coped admirably.
Organise your libraries
To add a library log in to your Plex server (same address as step two below) go to Settings (in the top-right)>Manage> Libraries and select Add Library. If, for example, you’ve categorised your TV Shows by genre, and have a structure like TV/Documentary/History, then you should add each deepest subcategory (for example, History) as its own library, otherwise you might end up with a bit of a mess. Once they’re scanned, new libraries will appear in Plex’s sidebar. Click More to find them listed under your server name, with Plex’s own offerings below.
By default, only their Home and Movies & Shows screens are pinned to the sidebar, so you’ll also want to pin
your new libraries there for easier access. You’ll find that option by clicking the three dots next to each library. By default, Plex will use services like IMDB, (the imaginatively titled and open source) The Movie Database and Last.fm to obtain film posters and album artwork. You can configure other services, and your order of preference, in the Agents area in Plex’s settings.
You’ve probably noticed the banner alerting you to an “unclaimed Plex server” on your network. Despite signing in to said server with your Plex account to set it up, your account isn’t yet tied to your server, so claim it now by clicking the link just in case anyone else on your network does so. Once that’s done, signing in with a different account won’t offer access to the server. That user will instead be taken to their www.plex.tv homepage. This is why we didn’t allow remote access earlier, it’s now safe to do so and we’ll look at that in a moment.
Configure Plex
With everything now pretty much set up, we should dig into Plex’s settings a little. In Settings> Library you’ll find options to automatically scan an entire library when changes are detected, or just the directory in which those changes took place. There’s a separate setting for Music directories, because scanning a huge library with tens of thousands of files will may run you into the kernel’s limit on the number of files that can be opened at a given time. All things being equal Plex will, unless told otherwise, stream the original media file to whatever device the host is watching on.
This may be undesirable, for example, streaming a 4K file to an old PC, so you can have the server transcode media on the fly during playback. Just hit the Settings button and adjust the quality dropdown. Files can be transcoded to x264 at fractions of the original bandwidth, down to sub 0.5mbit/s. Extensive transcoding operations running in parallel will take their toll on your server, so if you anticipate your machine being challenged then tweak the Transcoder options in the main settings page. Conversely, if your machine is fast you may want to turn everything up to 11. It’s also possible to generate bespoke versions of files in your library, saving the need for future transcoding. Mobile and TV presets are available, or you can choose a custom resolution, bitrate and platform. Click the three dots on a file’s thumbnail and choose Optimise to generate these. You can keep track of your new files in Settings> Manage> Optimised Versions.
By this point, you should be able to access your Plex server from anywhere on your local network. If you grab the iOS or Android apps you can use your phone too (although to stream for more than one minute requires a Plex Pass). And there are apps for Sonos, Kodi, Roku and all manner of other devices. You’ll still need to log in with your Plex account to see your media. However, you can share your libraries with other Plex users, or indeed add managed users (like Profiles in Netflix). Go to the Users and Sharing option in Settings. If your friends are too lazy to sign up for a Plex account, you can always sign up for them using a throwaway email address. You can even accept the invitation for them by copying the link after clicking Add a Friend. Adding extra users to the server itself is reserved for Plex Pass holders only.
Before you or your friends can access your server remotely, you’ll need to enable remote access in the Settings menu. Plex will try and use UPnP to configure your router to forward a random port, but if this doesn’t work it will tell you. You can try specifying a port in case this makes any difference. If not, you’ll have to set this up on your router manually. This involves forwarding a TCP port (use 32400 if you’re unimaginative, and don’t mind being automatically scanned once in a while) to your server’s IP address on the LAN, where Plex is running on port 32400.
“Plex will use services like IMDB, (the imaginatively titled and open source) The Movie Database and Last.fm to obtain film posters and album artwork.”