I’ve installed plex but I don’t even know where to start with it. Is there an “idiots guide” anywhere that I can follow?
What can it do? Can I access it from my chromecast? Is there a difference between plex player and plex? Why do I even need it? If I get it to work, what else do I need to make it useful?
So many questions and most guides I’ve found are far too advanced, or they don’t tell you enough. I want to know, just explained in a way that doesn’t assume I’m an plex expert.
Plex is a media server. You can think of it like an instance of Netflix that you host yourself, with all your own media.
It lets you keep your media on one computer, and access it from anywhere on any device.
Plex Media Server (PMS), or sometimes just referred to as Plex, Is the server itself. It tracks all your media, metadata, etc, and handles servery stuff like transcoding, and actually serving the media.
Just like any other streaming service, to connect to the server and actually play the media, you need a client. There are many different Plex clients including but not limited to:
Yes! you can cast from your phone to a Chromecast in the Plex app. If you’ve got an android TV, you can also install the native Plex app, and browse Plex like any other streaming service.
Probably because you (will) have a lot of media sitting around, and need a way to access the media without being physically in front of the computer it is stored on. Maybe you want to share your media collection with other people.
Plex works pretty well on its own! You just need to provide your own media, and point Plex at where your media is. This can be through ripping Blurays, or … less than legal means. If you plan on going the legally murky route, there are many other applications like Sonarr and Radarr that will automatically find and download media, but that’s too advanced for now.
LMK if you have any other questions, I’d be glad to give more answers.
Which hardware do you recommend? I am thinking about setting up pihole as well in the same server. Do you think this would work? I am trying to find a reasonably priced refurbished server, but I am finding difficult to find/understand how big HDD these support.
You can definitely run pihole and Plex on the same machine!
I would go for a used PC over a refurb server. servers eat up a lot of electricity and will increase your electric bills quite a bit.
go for something with an Intel CPU, maybe a 10th gen i3, or even older if you want cheaper. Intel’s quicksync will let you do hardware transcoding without a GPU. you really don’t need a very powerful cpu otherwise, both Plex and pihole aren’t very heavy on the cpu.