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Plex Media Server on Cloud
- crooked-v 10y agoThis has the big limitation, at least at the moment, that the supported providers all cap out at 1 TB for any kind of reasonably-priced storage.
- ascagnel_ 10y agoOriginally, they were going to support Amazon (who offers more storage as part of Prime), but that was dropped at some point. Those cloud providers likely don't want to get into the business of hosting media files that go into Plex. There aren't a lot of legal ways to get TV shows and movies (the bulk of the space) into the DRM-free format that Plex needs.
- joshuata 10y agoIt's also painfully slow. I've been using it for the past few months, and it rescans my library every time I access it. Half the time it shows my libraries as empty. Overall it feels very unfinished.
- majora2007 10y agoIt is still in Beta after all. The meta data loading is much slower than my server, but transcoding so far has been great.
- morganvachon 10y agoI figured it would be too slow for daily use for my own needs, based on my current setup. I have a Nvidia Shield TV as the Plex server and living room Plex client, with a home-built NAS running OpenMediaVault for media storage. The Shield and NAS are both connected to Gigabit Ethernet, and I occasionally run into slowdowns if I'm trying to watch in the living room, my wife is watching in the bedroom via Roku, and my sister-in-law across the city is watching via her Roku. I've narrowed it down to a saturated network, the Shield was barely breaking a sweat transcoding the files. With that said, using the Shield as the server greatly improved our previous streaming situation. Before using the Shield, we'd struggle to maintain two good quality streams at once, whether both were local or one was local and one remote. The previous server was no slouch: Core2 Quad with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, but it seems the Shield is well qualified to handle server duties.
- voltagex_ 10y agoWhich CPU was it? I doubt Plex are using the latest ffmpeg, but I saw big jumps between the i7 920, 2600k and then finally the 6800k. That said, my current Plex box is an Atom C2758, which seems to handle 1-2 streams just fine (1 direct, 1 transcode).
- morganvachon 10y agoCore2 Quad Q8400. That machine is now being used as a Linux/BSD testbed every now and then, and it's still plenty fast enough for modern desktop duties. The other concern the Shield mitigates is power inefficiency; that C2Q is a power hungry beast, and the entire Shield box uses less wattage at full load than the Intel CPU alone at idle.
- dewey 10y agoGoogle Drive business account with one person in it has unlimited storage for a very reasonable price. There's a lot of information about that on https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5kamuv/google_unlimited/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5kamuv/google_...
- crooked-v 10y agoThe top comment on that includes... > edit: be warned that many people are receiving 24 hour bans utilizing their Google Drive as network attached storage with Plex.
- Kariboupseudo 10y agoJust need for supported cloud storage to become affordable i guess...
- supernovae 10y agoOneDrive comes with Office365 which is 90 bucks a year when found on sale.. You get 1TB of cloud storage for up to 5 family members and you get Office Pro for up to 5 PCs as well.. not a bad deal in the end.
- anthonybsd 10y agoI have around 8TB on Plex, so that won't work for me :(
- supernovae 10y agowell, you could create 5 accounts under the single master and have 5 tb online.. for 90 bucks a year.. just use an account for each service.. movies / tv / whatever :)
- rorosaurus 10y agoThis is a massive pain, and also against the TOS. Amazon Cloud Drive is $60/year for unlimited storage.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ClayM 10y agoIs there a good option for encrypted cloud storage that this can access? Unless you want whoever scanning your stuff and seeing your collection of anime...
- benologist 10y agoPlex are already monitoring everything you have and watch and send that information to their servers for retrieving meta info/thumbnails from third-party APIs they proxy.
- bubblethink 10y agoIt's about the cloud provider monitoring your data. Plex by definition has to see the data to serve it.
- benologist 10y agoPlex the software running on your own hardware playing files on your own storage is a MiTM funneling your data through their servers to publicly accessible third-party APIs. Plex the company does not need to do that to play or catalog your videos. Plex the cloud software (aka Plex the software on a VM) keeps them out of your private network but will still superfluously send your data from the VM to Plex the company.
- pgrote 10y agoThis is a pretty good guide for Amazon Cloud drive: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...
- jonursenbach 10y agoACD no longer works with Plex Cloud.
- 10y ago
- rando21951 10y agoI actually wish they would add support for HDFS- it's not a bad way to combine lots of somewhat-small (< 2TB) disks into a sizable amount of (seemingly) homogenous storage (without having to be super clever with mount points and hard links and BTRFS and junk like that).
- bane 10y agoWhy bother? just add more directories of content to each library. Plex just merges them all at the library level. I have crap stashed over 5 drives, just plain vanilla USB drives, and plex handles them just fine.
- illumin8 10y agoData protection. HDFS replicates chunks of files across 3 different drives by default. This is configurable, but it's one of the most simple ways to protect your data from drive failures, without the performance penalty of RAID.
- bane 10y agoyeah, that's fair. Might want to see if the HDFS NFS Gateway works for this. https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-hdfs/HdfsNfsGateway.html https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/ha...
- krackers 10y agoCan't you create a zfs storage pool?
- planetjones 10y agoI have an lifetime plex pass membership. I think it cost $120. I am not sure how they will be able to continue to offer me plex cloud, as servers which plex are paying for must be doing the transcoding. The bill for CPU must be fairly hefty if people really start to use this.
- bubblethink 10y agoMaybe transcoding won't be needed eventually for a majority of users ? A lot of media right now exists in h264 which newer devices can anyway play. Since AV1 has broad industry support, it might be also become ubiquitous.
- lotyrin 10y agoMost of my transcoding usage in Plex isn't for a target codec or target resolution, but for a target bitrate.
- luhn 10y agoPerhaps they transcode to multiple formats/bitrates locally before upload?
- matrixagent 10y agoThat's not the case, and it would be utterly unusable for 90% of users.
- dantiberian 10y agoI'm pretty sure this is still a trial and they will eventually charge for it. I seem to remember reading something like that when it was first announced.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dmerrick 10y agoI'm a huge Plex fan, but I'm really not comfortable using this until it supports encryption. I would only use this for media where you have the legal rights to copy it.
- dsacco 10y agoIf the media were truly encrypted that would make transcoding at the server level essentially impossible. It would have to be decrypted client-side.
- DavideNL 10y agothat's not even possible. where do you want to store the encryption key to decrypt the movie and play it? In the cloud as well? you can't store it in your chromecast or whatever..
- hardoncollider 10y agoWhy couldn't you store this in your Plex account, versus on the storage medium? Everything is routed through Plex's services, seems like you could decouple those two things quite easily while still having full encryption on the cloud storage. In fact, if Plex really wanted this to succeed, they should have a tool which encrypts the files, synchronizes the files with the cloud provider, and then releases the keys to Plex.
- DavideNL 10y agoYea sorry, what i meant was encryption keys should (generally / always) be stored client-side...
- Veratyr 10y agoGoogle Drive and Dropbox both have extensive history regarding the storage of copyrighted content which basically boils down to storing it is fine, sharing it through the platform is not. This is even in their policies. I believe the DMCA is the same, there's nothing stopping you from possessing copyrighted content without a license, just the distribution and manufacture of it.
- yellow_viper 10y agoSo uh, how does this work? What's to stop me from sticking my data up there and sharing it with 1000 friends? Where is the trancoding done? I was a member of a private plex group with about 8TB of media. He was constantly running into problems due to people sharing accounts, causing his server load to become unfeasible.
- dsacco 10y agoI have a pretty large collection of media (double digit TB of ripped blurays and lossless music). I solved that by IP whitelisting access to my Plex port at the router level for my home. All friends who I share this with sign up for their own account, and once I share my library with that account I also set a rule that requires it to be whitelisted.
- teilo 10y agoBecause you would have to give your 1000 friends the Plex login to your paid Plex account, and this would likely be noticed and your account suspended.
- bubblethink 10y agoI don't think that's necessary. They can all have their own logins. Plex allows coarse sharing for free and more fine grained sharing in their paid product.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoThat's not how Plex works. A library can be shared with any number of users that you invite into your account.
- awinder 10y agoTranscoding is done in the cloud when required (some containers & encoding formats don't require transcoding, some do). There's a 3 concurrent stream limit when the device needs transcoding, so that might put a hamper on your 1K friends.
- relics443 10y agoI've been using this since day one. It's been a bumpy ride, but the past few weeks it's been working really well.
- cptskippy 10y agoI set this up during the Beta and it works reasonably well. Cloud Libraries behave just as Shared Libraries do in the App. I didn't see a restriction on the number of Cloud Libraries you can setup and they show up as available libraries in your Plex App. So I could see using the cloud server as a way to avoid eating up home server bandwidth if you do a lot of remote streaming. Particularly if your ISP has bandwidth caps. There might also be a performance benefit since cloud storage is faster than a lot of people's upstream connections to the internet.
- machbio 10y agothis is a failed project - there was a lot of expectation when they initially started with Amazon Cloud Drive..with a technical limitation that they faced with Amazon Cloud Drive - they completely eliminated Amazon Cloud Drive from its storage options..I called it failed, because there is no way, I will pay loads of money to Dropbox or Google for the Terabyte of my Homelab videos.. Amazon Cloud Drive would definitely been an option - that I would consider, since they have a fixed 60$ for unlimited data..
- supernovae 10y agonot sure why it would be failed because they couldn't use amazon.. i remember reading about some threat of content scanning/copyright violation problem with amazon...
- dewey 10y agothey said that's not true, it was a technical limitation that they couldn't resolve
- awinder 10y agoIf you're a former university student, check and see if your school has switched over to google apps for email. I recently realized I've had a free, unlimited google drive for a while now, just waiting to be used...
- bubblethink 10y agoThis is not their fault really. Economics are out of their control. So are terms of usage of various cloud data providers. Not to mention, none of them have any native way of accessing the storage as a file system (at least on linux). Nothing is unlimited as bargain prices. Amazon's unlimited pricing was neer meant for this, much like cellphone unlimited internet is not meant as a replacement for broadband (at their prices). They'll eventually throttle or just terminate your contract.
- Veratyr 10y agoYou can get unlimited data from Google Drive and Dropbox for about the price of 1TB, you just need to use a business account. This seems to be the main solution for the people I know who are using this.
- supernovae 10y agoAnyone have any experience with this service yet? Do you have to re-encode your videos? Curious since some MKV's i ripped a while ago are transcoded and can be CPU heavy to play. Anyone know how plex cloud handles this when played on Xbox One app or Mobile phone?
- Veratyr 10y agoThe draw of Plex (cloud or otherwise) is that it handles all that for you. It'll transcode to the correct format and even embed subtitles if you need it to. On the backend it uses ffmpeg so it should support pretty much any format. I think it even supports HEVC.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- drampelt 10y agoFor those wishing to use Amazon Cloud Drive with their own Plex server https://amc.ovh/ https://amc.ovh/ has some great instructions. I've been doing this with very little issues for a few months now. EDIT: More up to date instructions at https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...
- ben174 10y agoWow. "Unlimited" for $60/yr. Do you think they'd be ok with me uploading my entire 12tb library? I wasn't able to find any limits in the fine print.
- iNeal 10y agoI've read people saying they have at least 3 times that.
- mmozeiko 10y agoI have ~18TB there. No issues so far. Some people have 1.3PB there: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xhqsk/linux_isos_%CA%96/deikchd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xhqsk/linux_i... Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NmGQf7b.png https://i.imgur.com/NmGQf7b.png
- Veratyr 10y agoPlenty of people on Reddit's /r/DataHoarder have done far more than that, easily into the tens of TBs. The problems come when you upload unencrypted copyrighted content or try to download more than 1TB in a single day.
- throwaway91111 10y agoWait, what happens if you upload unencrypted copyright content? I legally own quite a bit of that, as I suspect most people do.
- 10y ago
- nichochar 10y agoPlex is one of my favorite services. One of those companies that makes it easy for me to donate.
- e40 10y agoI was really annoyed, though, when they released version 1.0 and removed access to all previous downloads. Turns out, 1.0 (on Debian) was broken and I could no longer FF on my Roku. The forums were filled with people complaining, but they would not make the older, good release available. After a week or two someone provided it to me via dropbox. You might ask why I didn't have the previous download? Because the way I was building my plex docker container would download the latest one, directly. I removed the previous container before I verified all features were working. And, at that point, I wasn't backing up containers (they are stateless, so why bother?), so I was royally screwed for 2 weeks (in terms of FF). The fact that they are closed source, and behaved this way. It really soured me on them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rckrd 10y agoWhy didn't they use S3 or GCS as the backing store? Why do we need upload & sync? Seems like you only need just upload and go.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nighthawk454 10y agoBecause Dropbox/GoogleDrive can be set up by the user. Going with S3/GCS would require either Plex host (read: pay for) the storage or the user to set up their own cloud accounts.
- notatoad 10y agoMost people use Plex for pirated content. If Plex uses S3 or GCS as the backing store, then they are hosting and delivering their users' pirated content and opening themselves up to all kinds of legal problems. If they're just providing a way to stream content from some external storage, they have a lot less liability.
- ksec 10y agoI am going to assume, a lot of people are storing Copyrighted Materials. 1. This essentially allows you to store all your favorite collection, what happens if Google Drive decide to wipe all those out? 2. Why not do this on a NAS?
- radiorental 10y ago> 2. Why not do this on a NAS? NAS boxes capable of running Plex media server are not inexpensive.