so i finally got a plex server set up on a tiny little VPS, which is something i've been meaning to do for a long time. to start, I only bought a $5/month server, which has 25GB of storage (obviously going to need to bump it up soon enough).

does anyone else here use Plex? And if so, do you use it to replace streaming services like Netflix or HBO or maybe even Spotify? If so, how do you like it as a replacement? I spent this weekend uploading a bunch of things and am quickly realizing it's going to be a pain in the ass to maintain. I'm typically waiting until night to upload, so my bandwidth isn't congested during peak hours, which is working out pretty good except for the times that it fails during the night. Overall, it's going okay, but going to take a lot of hours to build up a respectable library, and I feel like i might lost interest eventually.

For those who don't know what Plex is, it's a media server that you can either pay for as a service or host yourself and stream your own content that you upload to the service (or pay for content Plex offers). The benefits are a great out-of-the-box streaming experience for a lower cost than if you were paying for multiple different streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

I don't have Plex, but I too am curious, since I've been considering building a media server to host my massive collection of physical media.

i have an update here after some time uploading files. so i spend the last week uploading the entirety of avatar the last airbender (roughly 19GB total) and working my way through uploading the entirety of Lost (about 33GB per season)

what i'm realizing is uploading television takes up a lot of space very quickly. i ended up attaching some more storage to my server, so now i'm paying about $36/mo for over 300GB of storage, which will get me pretty far, but i think i'm going to stop uploading TV and just focus on movies. that way, i won't hit my storage capacity any time soon.

so in short, i think plex can't 100% replace your streaming services if you like to watch TV, but could be a nice replacement if you just like to watch movies

i also don't think replacing spotify or apple music is in the cards either. those services are just too good at exposing me to new music, and i really value that (i use spotify)

I use Plex for free, streaming downloaded videos from a spare PC to my Roku.

It doesn't replace streaming services but it lets me supplement them.

yeah i guess the one thing for me was to potentially be able to download stuff for when i take flights back home, which is frequent enough to where it's nice to have that option.

i'm assuming you mean your spare PC is just available on your home network

I run a media server and have done for about three years now. Doing it on someone else's computer just isn't cost effective at all. You can use pretty much any old hardware and run plex or jellyfin locally, and those $36/mo, over a couple of months would buy several terabytes of disk space. I started off in 2020 with a NUC8 and ~15TB of drives that I got in black friday sales, and over the years (with some user donations thrown in) that's grown to about 30TB. No need to RAID or anything like that cause if a drive fails you can just suck it all back down from the "public cloud" (wink).

Currently serving something like 13K TV episodes and 1K movies (and my personal music collection for just me), got 20 users (friends and family) some of which throw me a bone sometimes. I set up Sonarr/Radarr to manage the library fairly early on, later on brought in Bazarr to pick up subtitles automatically and Ombi to manage requests from users, and I wrote myself a little dashboard so that I don't have to go and check on this stuff manually as much.

On the music front, I mostly use bandcamp to discover new stuff, then buy/DL and chuck it into a folder, and serve that out with Navidrome. There're a decent number of compatible mobile apps so I can get hold of all my music on the go.

As someone who's not necessarily tech illiterate, but has fallen out of doing computer stuff for about 10 years now, how would one get started using Plex or Jellyfin?

yeah i feel like i'd also be interested in knowing that too. i feel like getting my own hardware setup is juuuuuuuuuust outside of the level of effort i'd be willing to put in, but who knows

It really depends if you want it just inside your house, or accessible from anywhere.

If the latter and you're not particularly techie, plex with the subscription works okay for this (but ofc, removes the benefit of just paying power bills). Plex is extremely simple, just download, run, point it at the drives you have your stuff on and you're good to go.

Jellyfin is a bit more involved but it's all FOSS, you can run it for your local network with the same amount of time investment as plex (i.e., just install and run, point at drives) but if you want it accessible anywhere you'll need to slap a webserver in front of it with reverse proxy config, optionally point a domain at your home IP, etc. If you've ever set up a web server before it's not particularly hard and there are example configs online that you can crib from. (You can also run jellyfin in docker if you are so inclined, not sure about plex in this regard)

The real bonus IMO is sonarr/radarr, they are basically like digital PVRs for TV/movies respectively, they hook into TVDB/IMDB and will manage grabbing releases from the web/usenet for you, and move it into directories where your media server will pick them up automatically, so in a lot of cases acquiring new content becomes zero-effort.

There are a few guides better than my rambling here: https://agatsyasingh.wordpress.com/2022/04/21/setting-up-a-media-server-with-docker-jellyfin-deluge-sonarr-and-radarr/ https://www.fuzzygrim.com/posts/media-server

I used to have a Raspberry Pi with a 1 terabyte SSD that I ran Plex off of. I only had it up for a few weeks because I accidentally formatted the drive, but during that time it worked decently well. Since I was using a Raspberry Pi, it struggled a bit to stream to my TV, but when it came to streaming to my phone, it worked decently well. If I was to do it again, I would probably use Jellyfin just because it is open source and free, but overall Plex worked quite well for me.

lol

I just remembered I have an old computer, I may be able to use. I'm not sure how old though, I'd estimate about 8. My dad sorta stuffed it into my car last time I visited, along with an unusable 3D printer.

At the very least I have a tower that I can put new hardware in.