 You've got all these photos, videos, and music sitting on your computer at home. Just sitting there when you could be enjoying them from anywhere. You need to get a media server. But, Lyus, I have a Google Drive where I keep my photos and movies. And you're paying Google how much a month? Just to access files remotely? There's a much better and much cheaper way. It's called Plex. And while Plex did sponsor this video, it's no secret that I was already a mostly happy, long-time user of their product. And it's not just me. One in every seven people in our office hosts their own Plex server. Why? Because of its ease of use, general polish, and near-universal cross-platform compatibility. And they're one of the few software companies that still offers perpetual licenses with affordable per-device licensing or more expensive memberships that cover all devices connected to your server. So the topic we landed on for our collaboration is three ways that you can set up your own server at home along with some simple tips and tricks to get you up and running. First things first, though. Why Plex? If you are someone who has a lot of media stored on your computer, be it high-quality audio files, photos, home movies or home... movies? Plex is pretty much the easiest way to get your own media server up and running. So you or your friends and family can access your collection from anywhere and on nearly any device, be it a computer, phone, game console or smart TV. One of the brilliant features of Plex is its ability to find the metadata for all of your files, automatically sorting them into folders with episode titles, thumbnails, descriptions and cast members. It'll even find and sort behind-the-scenes clips and trailers. My deployment is pretty simple with two personal folders, one for TV and one for movies. And I don't even sort anything more than that. I just toss my legally obtained DRM-free files with descriptive titles into those folders and let Plex sort out the rest. Misidentified clips and other problems can crop up occasionally, but it can be easily corrected. More on that later. Also, the darn thing can handle pretty much any file format you throw at it, be that video, audio, even subtitles. It's pretty amazing. Alright, this all sounds great, but how do I do it? We'll strap in for some tech tips here, because we're gonna give you a rundown of three different ways that you can implement a personal Plex server using a Windows PC, an Nvidia Shield, that's not my shield, there it is, or a network-attached storage server or NAS. Ooh, a server, hey? Doesn't that need like super expensive high-performance hardware? Not really. As we demonstrated in this recent video, your old PC is sitting there waiting for its second life as your new server. And the basic features of Plex are light enough that you can install it on some pretty dated hardware, though there are a few things to consider. If you have slower hardware, that could limit the performance of your server, particularly if you have multiple clients connected at once, or if you are transcoding the videos being viewed. When a client tries to watch a file that is too beefy for their connection, or that was encoded in a format that isn't natively supported on their device, your server will attempt to convert that file on the fly so that it can be viewed. This can take a lot of computational power, especially if the files are big. So if you're using an older system as your server, you may consider limiting the resolution of your media. One benefit of Plex's paid tier, PlexPass, is that it allows you to use hardware encoding. So if you have an Intel CPU or Nvidia GPU from the last decade or so, you can take advantage of those super fast hardware encoders to ensure a smooth streaming experience. Now the question is which platform should you use? Using your current PC is the simplest, has the most users and thus the most support materials, but the downside is that if your server is being used, say by a sibling or a spouse, while you are using your computer, say, to game, you can encounter performance issues. Also, your precious local storage is going to be taken up by your media files. So the Nvidia Shield is one of the cheapest ways to move the processing load away from your main rig if you don't have another device to host your server, though it does come at the cost of easy expandability and it doesn't really have a meaningful upgrade path. Your NAS, well, that requires a bit more know-how and also a NAS, but it can be easy to expand and you can configure your system to be as powerful or lean as you like. Atom is going to get you started with Windows. First, go to Plex.tv and download the Plex Media Server. Follow the steps in the setup wizard and then select your media folders. You can use pretty much any folder, but for the best experience, use dedicated library folders that only contain a single form of media each. Don't mix your photos with your DRM-free digital movies. Then give a quick test to make sure your media is working and you are off to the races. Download the Plex app on, well, pretty much anything. Log in and boom, you have your media libraries at your fingertips. Yeah, it's really that simple, at least on your local network. We'll talk about remote access a little bit later, though. We're going to give you some tips on how to manage your server, but first we're going to show you how to get things up and running on my favorite streaming device, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro. Nice backpack linus. I know, right? It's super durable and comes with a limited lifetime warranty from lttstore.com. There are two versions of the Shield TV with nearly identical features as far as most people are concerned, but we need the Pro version for our application because it supports expandable storage over USB. First, you'll download the Plex app and the Plex Media Server app. Then boot up the Plex app, click on Enable Plex Media Server, follow the prompts, wait for the server to configure, and you're done. Now take your external hard drive and plug it into your Nvidia Shield. Click on the notification and tap to set up. Then eject the drive and take it to a computer. You'll see that the Shield created a folder aptly named Nvidia Shield. This is the folder on the drive that the Shield will be able to access. Move your media folders inside the Shield folder, and while we're on the computer, log into app.plex.tv so you can configure your server in the next step. Plug your drive back into the Shield, then back on the Plex browser app, click Manage Libraries and Add Folders and select the folder on the drive that contains your media. You should see Plex begin to auto-populate with your folders. Your Plex server will scan the files, find poster art, metadata, and all sorts of other fun stuff. But this stuff will be stored directly on your Shield, meaning that your 16 gigs of internal storage could start filling up, especially if you have a large media library. We recommend moving the server location to an external drive, but that puts us in a bit of a pickle because if we want to add media to our drive, then we need to unplug our server. That's no good. But there is an easy fix. Just use the Shield as a network drive where you can drop files in from your PC. We don't have time to cover exactly how to do that here, so check out Lon.tv's video. We're going to have that linked down below. Pfft, that looks inconvenient. So here's the king's way of doing things on your own NAS. I mean, you already have the server set up. Why not use it? While Plex is available on open source operating systems like TrueNAS, which is meant for storage, our tutorial will be centered around Unraid, since that's what Linus and I both use at home. If you've never configured a NAS before, I know it can sound a little intimidating, but it's actually not that hard, as long as you don't have to do it with Linus at your site. Check out Floatplane.com for a longer version of us building the server that runs our firewall here. It was total absolute shenanigans. We're going to assume you already have an Unraid NAS up and running, but if you want to learn more about doing that, you can check out our video about it down in the description. The first thing you're going to need to do is set up a new share. This will be the folder structure that will hold your media files, and you can name it something like media or my stuff or files or not prong. And then you can make a couple of subfolders for your categories like movies, family videos, TVs, photos, whatever you want. Go to apps and install the Community Apps plugin. We'll have a link to that in the description. Follow the instructions, search for Plex Media Server, and then hit the download icon. From this screen, we're going to need to input a couple of things. First off, in the host path to where it says slash transcode, you're going to type in slash temp slash. This is where files will live when they're being transcoded for a client. In host path three, which is slash data, type in slash mount slash user slash whatever you named your media share earlier. So not prong or whatever you titled your media share. Then in key one, which is titled Plex claim, you're going to input your Plex claim code. To get one, head to Plex.TV slash claim and log into your Plex account. If you don't have one already, you can make one at this step and then copy and paste that code into the text box. Leave everything else alone and then click apply. Then the app will automatically get downloaded via Docker and set up. To get started using your Plex server, go to the Docker tab, click the Plex logo, and then hit Web UI. This will take you to the Web UI of your Plex server. And before you can actually start watching anything, you're going to need to go into your settings and set up your library folders. So each of those folders you made before, let's say TV or movies, select those. Then Plex can actually see the media and you can watch. See, I told you it wouldn't be that hard. Back to you, Linus. But Plex isn't just a bring your own media affair. When you sign up for a Plex account, you also get access to 300 live TV channels and 50,000 on-demand movies and TV shows completely free. You've got things like iTonya or Anthony Bourdain's The Cooks Tour. And another cool feature is that Plex will let you keep a watch list that includes not just your local files, not just Plex TV, but media from every other streaming service too. For free, you get a ton of awesome features. But if you're keen for a couple more things, you can get Plex Pass for $4.99 a month, $40 a year, or $120 for the rest of your life. You can upgrade your Plex experience to take advantage then of members only features like hardware transcoding, which if you plan on having a lot of people using your server is a must. You can even use Plex as a DVR with your set top box or antenna and record broadcast television. Or you can download media to your mobile device to watch on the plane. There are even fun settings like playing trailers before your movie so that you can get the cinema experience right in your home. If you're into that sort of thing, do they have a feature where I can press a button to pay an extra $10 for my popcorn? And new features are always being added with early access for Plex Pass members like support for multiple editions of movies. So you don't have to find out 15 minutes into Return of the Jedi that you chose the version with that awful Jedi Rock song. Oh, and we haven't even mentioned that Plex has their own audio player targeted at audio files called Plex AMP, which allows you to listen to your audio files at full bitrate and has the ability to link with your title account so that you have all your hi-fi audio in one slick media player. Now that your server is up and running, you're probably ready for some tips and tricks. If you want to watch content from your server on a mobile device, you'll have to either have Plex Pass or pay a one-time fee for your mobile device. Also, during setup, the server will attempt to configure remote access so you can get to your media files from outside of your own Wi-Fi network. This configuration uses Universal Plug and Play or UPnP, which should work fine as long as you have a router that's less than 10 or so years old. But if you have a unique home router configuration or if you disabled UPnP because it's a fundamentally flawed feature that carries enormous security risks, then that might not work. Thankfully, Plex's massive knowledge base and large and enthusiastic community means that almost any issue you'll encounter, well, someone else has probably had it too, and there's likely a solution. If UPnP isn't an option, you can either open the ports manually or use something like NGINX Reverse Proxy to make sure that your server is secure. Again, check out the description for a link to the software and a tutorial for setting it up with Plex. If your system struggles with transcoding your media, you can optimize your media ahead of time. This function converts your media to a file size and format that's ideal for specific scenarios, like streaming to your TV or to your mobile phone, so you don't have to deal with buffering or processing when you're just trying to enjoy your content. On that subject, if you don't want to see anything other than your own content, like the free TV shows and movies, here's how to turn that off. In the left-hand menu, you have your pinned libraries, so just hover over that, click the dots, and select Remove from Pinned. This will hide the content of those libraries from the side menu and from the Plex homepage. Should you ever change your mind, you can see all of your servers and their respective libraries, and from here, you can pin them. If any of your content gets misidentified or is missing metadata, you can manually set them like this. But you should be able to mostly avoid this if you follow Plex's published best practices for file naming. We're going to have that linked down below. And if renaming all your files sounds incredibly tedious, don't worry, Tiny Media Manager is your knight in shining armor, allowing you to batch process these tasks. Now, all of this is super cool, but we do need to take a second to acknowledge something. Inconvenient timing for this collaboration, but Plex was just in the tech news due to a recent data breach. This past August, usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords were accessed from Plex's servers. That sucks. However, Plex immediately alerted their customers and encouraged users to change their passwords, even though the passwords that were stolen were encrypted. This is a good response. And it's also nice to know that Plex isn't storing credit card data on those servers. This kind of thing is a downside with any centrally authorized service, and I sincerely hope that they can do better in the future. But I do applaud them for their transparency, and that's the reason we were still comfortable working with them. Back to the stuff they'd rather I talk to you about. Next week is Plex's Pro Week. Between September 19th and 23rd, 2022, it's a great time to learn how to take your personal media experience to new heights. And throughout the week, Plex will be highlighting experts and community members to discuss the various features and benefits of PlexPass. We're also included in the lineup, by the way, so be sure to check out the video next week at the link down below. If you enjoyed this video, why not check out our video about my home server? You can learn more about Unraid or ZFS. Cool, right?