Guide: Setting Up Plex Media Server

by Damian on February 6, 2012 · 32 comments

I am always searching for new and exciting software to help manage my growing media library at home. Recently I came across one such platform called Plex. The goal of Plex is to create a complete solution for all your online and local media needs. For the purpose of this guide I will take a look at Plex Media Server, which acts as a central media management database for distributing all your content to your various playback devices.

Downloads:

All downloads for Plex can be found here. I will be specifically installing Plex Media Server (PMS) on my Windows Home Server, which can be found here (make sure you download Plex Media Server and not Plex Media Center).

Requirements:

As per the Plex website, here are the requirements (once again, specifically for Windows):

Windows minimum requirements
• Windows XP SP3, Vista, or Windows 7
• Flash and Silverlight video requires Windows Vista or Windows 7
• Direct X 9.0c compatible graphics card
• An Intel Core 2 Duo processor or equivalent
• At least 2GB of RAM, 4GB recommended

For optimal performance and compatibility with Plex Media Manager, we recommend Google Chrome, Safari, FireFox, or IE9 with Google Chrome Frame.

N.B. Windows Vista or above is required for Flash and Silverlight video.

In order to play Flash and Silverlight video, you will need to install the plug-ins on your computer before running the Plex Media Server. Install the Flash version from here and make sure you select the “Other Browser” version.

Install the Silverlight plug-in from here.

Installation:

No surprises here. Once the installer is downloaded simply double click to begin the installation process. One thing I noticed that wasn’t mentioned in the System Requirements, when I installed Bonjour x86 was required.

The usual array of screens will appear during the installation process. Once done the completion screen should appear noting the installation was a success. If the “Run Plex Media Server on exit” option is checked once you click the “Finish” button PMS should begin to run.

Setting Up and Managing Your Media Library:

With PMS now installed, you should see a little Plex icon in your toolbar.

Right click on the icon should bring up a list of options and select “Media Manager”. This will launch the Plex Media Manager in your default web browser via port 32400.

At this point you can go ahead and start adding your media library, but first let’s take a look at the various settings available via the “Preferences” link at the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The first option is “General”. Here you can choose a custom name for your PMS which is what will appear on any device that connects to PMS.

Next up is “Library” which allows you to set specific options such as how often PMS should update its library.

Under the “Agents” option you can see what “agents” or services PMS will use to gather information for your media library.

The “Languages” section allows you to choose a default language (I believe English is the default) for your audio and subtitle tracks.

If you are 3G user, the “Transcoding” section will give you the option to allow PMS to offer higher bitrates when transcoding over 3G.

There is a feature called “myPlex” which allows you to tie in PMS with all your Plex clients. You can sign up for a myPlex account here.

Under the “Advanced” tab are two options for disabling capability checking and enabling DTS downmix.

With the preferences set it is time to add our media library. Back on the Plex Media Manager screen simply click the specific media you are looking to add under the “Add Media To Your Library” section. A popup box should appear where you can point PMS to your media location.

Once you add your media get ready to be patient, especially if you have a large library, as it will take a while initially for PMS to gather all information from the various agents. Back on the home screen to the left under the Library sections you should see all media that you added. At the bottom of the screen should hopefully see nice posters of the most recent media added.

From here you can now view and manage your various media libraries by clicking on the desire section under Library Sections. Let’s take a quick look at some of the sections.

When you first enter the “Movies” section you should see a poster for each one of your movies (hopefully the posters are for the right movies!)

Clicking on a movie will take you into the details Plex has gathered (metadata, poster, and backdrop). If the movie Plex gathered is incorrect, simply click on the “Fix incorrect match” option at the bottom of the screen and you can manually direct Plex to the correct movie. You can also change the artwork shown as well as edit the metadata.

TV shows functions the same way as movies, with the first level showing a poster for each TV show.

Clicking on a TV show will bring up full details of the TV Show as well as individual posters for each season.

Drill down into a season and you should see each episode with thumbnail and metadata.

For Music Plex goes out and grabs artwork for each artist (as opposed to showing CD covers)

Drilling down into an artist you should see a brief biography of the artist and the associated albums (with CD coverart).

Plex On The Internet:

As I mentioned when going through the PMS settings, you have the ability to sign up for a myPlex account. You can log into your myPlex from any internet browser, and there are several things you can accomplish.

Once logged in to your myPlex account under the “Servers” tab you should see a list of all servers you have attached to your user name, as well as any servers share with you (more on this momentarily).

Through the “Server Sharing” you can share all or parts of your content with someone else (or vice versa). This would be great for sharing content with friends or family, although I did not test out so I cannot comment on how well this worked (in particular video).

Another interesting feature is called “Plex It!”. It gives you the ability to add videos (i.e. online content) to your queue so that you can watch later from one of your Plex clients (or even via a link in your myPlex webpage). This can me done by either adding the “Plex It!” button to your web browser bookmark bar (so if you see a video you want to add yo your queue simply clicking the button will add) or by forwarding any video link you get in your email to a designated myPlex email address.

Lastly, from your myPlex page you can access your PMS site to view and manage your media.

One thing worth pointing out, with myPlex you cannot actually play back your media. In order to play back, you will require a client which will be discussed below.

Plex Clients:

Now that your Plex library is set up with PMS, the final step is to have a client which will connect to PMS for viewing. Currently the choices are as follows:

Plex on your Desktop (i.e. HTPC)
Plex for mobile devices (iOS and Android)
Plex for connected devices (2011 and 2012 LG Smart TVs, Google TV, and Roku)

I don’t own any “connected” devices and didn’t get a chance to test out Plex on my HTPC (possibly a future writeup), but I did test out Plex on my mobile devices (i.e. iPad, Asus Transformer Tablet, and Kindle Fire). Plex mobile app currently costs $4.99 (iOS link here, Android/Google link here, and Android/Amazon link here). Let’s take a quick look at Plex for Android.

With the App installed, the first step will be connecting to your PMS, as well signing in to your myPlex account is applicable. You can also adjust some of the settings such as the video quality PMS should use for both when you are in network and when you are remotely connected.

Once you are connected to your PMS you will now be taken to the Plex homepage where you can access all your media broken into three categories (My Library, Channels, and Recently Added).

Here are a few screenshots from the My Library categories:

Sort/Categories for Movies (similar for the other library items as well)

Movies thumbnail page

Movie detail page

TV Show thumbnail page

TV Show episode page

Music thumbnail page

Music detail page

One of the other categories mentioned was “Channels”. In the words of Plex “Channels supplement the content available from your media server by accessing a wide variety of online sources and other applications.” Here is a screenshot of some of the channels available.

Previously we discussed a feature called “Plex It!”. Well, I decided that I had a craving to watch “Thong Song” on my tablet. From my PC I was able to “Plex It!” the music video from You Tube, and sure enough when I logged in to my Plex App the Thong Song was waiting for me to listen to in all its glory

Playback:

I was only able to test out playback on my home network (all my mobile devices are wi fi only and typically the places where I travel with them don’t have free wi fi to test out). In order to play back content on mobile devices, PMS will transcode the content (typically just videos) into a format that your mobile device will support. Because of this, there are several things that will occur. First, transcoding is a CPU intensive process, how well playback works may depend on the PC being used by PMS as well as if any other CPU intensive processes are running on the PC at the same time. Secondly, since transcoding is occurring there will be varying results in the picture quality (in combination with the video settings chosen, wireless connection, etc…). I would typically encounter some pixelation but on a small screen such as a mobile device it is more the acceptable. At times some A/V sync issues would occur but I could usually get cleared up pretty easily. I would be very interested to see how well video playback looks on a big screen TV where pixelation and degradation would be more pronounced. Music and photo playback had no issues (typical content being 320kbps mp3s and 2-3MB photos).

Additional Information:

There were a couple of additional items worth mentioning:

When you install PMS, all cached data will be stored on the same drive as where PMS is installed. For most people this hopefully shouldn’t be an issue assuming you have sufficient free space on your install drive. However, as a Windows Home Server user I am only allocated 20GB worth of free space on my C: drive. After installing PMS and adding media I noticed that my WHS started moving at a snails pace and eventually crashed on me. When I booted back up nearly all of the free space on my C: drive had been eaten up. After digging around I noticed that the straw that broke the camels back was PMS, where the cached folder was taking up nearly 4GB worth of space. After digging around it appears there is an option to point PMS to a separate drive for caching. I was able to get it to work but not 100% (I pointed it to one of my shared network folders and could see the cache had moved, but encountered some issues with images showing properly). Here is the thread for anyone who is interested.
I keep running into some stability issues with PMS, so I have had to shut off for the time being. All of a sudden while using one if the media players in my house it would become unresponsive. I would head over to my WHS and would see Plex errors appearing (Transcoding.exe crashing, etc…). Don’t know what was causing the errors since at the time Plex wasn’t even being used, but ultimately I need my WHS as close to 100% stable as possible which meant shutting off PMS. At some point I may revisit.

Final Thoughts:

I must say I am very impressed in what Plex has to offer. In my head the ultimate home setup revolves around having a central server/database that feeds to various devices, and Plex sure seems to fit the bill. This is where I think home media is heading, where all content is stored in a central location (whether it be cloud, server, etc…) and distributed to various devices.

For those who are using Plex I would be interested to hear your feedback. In particular for those using Plex on their HTPCs how do you find file support/playback, is PMS required for an HTPC, etc… For Connected Devices how well does the Plex App work and especially how is picture quality for video playback?

UPDATE – thanks to GusGus for pointing out, and unRAID plugin for Plex is in the works. For more details see here.

Tagged as: Android, App, Guide, iOS, Media Center, Media Streaming, Plex, Plex Media Center, Plex Media Server, Transcoding

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Article by Damian

Hi, my name is Damian, and I'm tech gadget addict! Although I always had some interest in technology, it wasn't until I got my EX470 and more importantly found Mediasmartserver.net, that my interest became an addiction. My goal, aside from world domination and to see the Mets/Broncos win another championship, is to set up the perfect digital home where all my media is available at the click of a button. When I am not writing for Mediasmartserver.net you can find me over at my blog at http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com or follow me on twitter

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{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }

Moodsman February 6, 2012 at 4:19 pm

Plex has become my choice for Media Center, the main reason being that it there is a plugin for Roku, so I can stream to Roku devices in the house without much hassle.
When the Plex player is installed on a Windows HTPC, it asks if you want to add it as a menu item in WMC, and it is pretty seamless.
If you have iTunes installed on the Plex server system, it links very nicely to your iTunes catalog, sorted, categorized and with a pretty nice display.
As of now, I only use WMC as a PVR, to watch recorded TV shows. I am looking for a decent PVR software (I miss SageTV!) to replace that piece also. For everything else I use Plex.

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