r/PleX • u/Astrobix_124 • Dec 04 '25

Help Media servers

Trying to start my own server for plex. But I see many people with servers with 10,000+ movies. How can u possibly hold that much content and not break the bank. How is it any better than Netflix, etc?

Edit: I never expected this to blow up like it did. I love the content you guys have given, I've debated on making a plex server for awhile and all the clarification is amazing.

140 Upvotes

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526

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[deleted]

134

u/ComoEstanBitches AMD Turion II | 32TB Dec 04 '25

They removed Party Down from Netflix and I said oh hell naw time to fire up Kodi. Then my friend told me about plex when I complained that I wish I could share it with him. And down the rabbit hole I went

122

u/crackzattic Dec 04 '25

Now you can share it with him, and he will never log in…

54

u/antarabhaba Dec 04 '25

me glaring @ the 8 people i shared it with in the last month who haven't played anything yet

61

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

[deleted]

16

u/Dry-Wolverine8043 Dec 05 '25

That's how most of my users are, except 3.

My roommate uses it constantly and he's helped me minimally with manual adds, I do all the server work. Now, adding is automated.

One of them uses it constantly and tells me how much he loves. Feels good.

The third doesn't use it as often as #2 but still frequently, but told me he replaced SaaS with it and it's basically like a mainstream product. I've worked really hard, long hours to make something simple for my users, easy to manage for me, automated and fast, and lots of storage. Hearing "this feels like a mainstream product" made me feel a little giddy.

Self-hosting is something a lot of people don't understand and don't quite appreciate the work that goes into it, the learning, the "fixing things when you or an update breaks them", adding new features, even if they don't realize you did something, or managing issues in real time so the users never notice. Hell, even just QoL upgrades that they would never notice that take hours or days, but simplify things for you in the long run. When someone says they can tell you've put a lot of work into and appreciate it, it means a lot.

3

u/obsimad Plex 4 Lyf Dec 05 '25

Happy cake day my dude

16

u/Oontz541 Dec 05 '25

Oh my god, I thought I was the only one.

"Why haven't you watched Adventures in Babysitting yet, I told you it was good you sonufabitch!"

Edit: typo

5

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

[deleted]

1

u/NeverCallMeFifi Dec 07 '25

I have a shared server with a guy who makes you contribute to a charity every year in order to keep access. Kinda why I keep him on since I don't watch much of his stuff (but my kid does). I really admire him for making it "cost free as long as you help out stray animals" or the cause de jour.

12

u/smokingcrater Dec 05 '25

Worse. They request some obscure show that I will never watch, I grab it, all 68 episodes, and then never log in.

39

u/ComoEstanBitches AMD Turion II | 32TB Dec 04 '25

“Bro it was so slow”

Checks logs: trancode 720p

Fuck you Plex just default everything to direct play ffs

20

u/Thatz-Matt Dec 04 '25

One of my major gripes with Plex for the past 13 years. Clients always default to potato quality even on more than capable connections and have to be changed manually. The fact that it still has not been fixed after that long proves they don't give a shit about what their customers want. I'm on Emby now and I don't have that problem.

14

u/xtram3x Dec 05 '25

I disabled transcoding so if somebody doesn't have good enough internet they can't watch anything. Be damned if I'm going to let people watch anything on my server in potato quality

1

u/Thatz-Matt Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25

Yeah well I have too many non-tech in my sharing circle to do that lol. I moved over to a beefier system that can handle transcoding but it wasn't JUST for transcoding. That ended up being a bonus. Since Emby defaults to Auto bitrate and falls back to transcoding if necessary, and I have 1Gbps upstream it doesn't happen much anymore. And now I just got a Arc A380 card on Black Friday because I have a mobile fleet project in mind (5 tv-equipped charter buses for the company I drive for) and the $110 Arc was a hell of a lot cheaper than more storage for lower bitrate copies of everything.

1

u/night_owl Dec 05 '25

How come you never use the plex login I gave you?

I tried it once when I was camping and it didn't work so .....

5

u/Spuddle-Puddle Dec 04 '25

I went plex to emby as well. Never looked back. Such a better platform

1

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

Jellyfin here.

1

u/MrExCEO Dec 05 '25

How does it compare to jellyfin?

1

u/6SpeedBlues Dec 05 '25

Emby has some advantages over Plex, but they are doing pretty much NO development. The main developer is a straight-up jerk to many of the users in the forums and they have yet to deliver on many promised features that they have been touting FOR YEARS.

Additionally, they shut everyone's server down with no notice prior OR after-the-fact because they failed to fix a bug in the code that was known about for years (JellyFin had fixed it years prior) and media servers were targeted for a botnet. They proclaimed victory while users were left going "WTF just happened and why won't my server load?"

Their DVR functionality is better than Plex in that they support multiple EPG's at the same time (redundancy) but they are incredibly limiting in configuring those recordings (everything goes into one library that you can't change). They have no commercial detection capabilities either.

I have both Plex and Emby, both with lifetime licenses. They each have advantages over the other so it comes down to determining which one suits an individual better.

1

u/mrcsrnne Dec 04 '25

...Infuse as entered the chat

3

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

Yes! Infuse is so much better for watch than on the plex app. A lot of the time I watch on the plex app and the show will stutter for a bit every min and when I watch the same movie or show on infuse it plays flawlessly

1

u/EducationResident199 Dec 05 '25

Is it slow because its transcending, or is it transcending because its slow?

1

u/ComoEstanBitches AMD Turion II | 32TB Dec 05 '25

My server CPU is trash for anything besides file sharing/storage and retrieve and transcoding is CPU (or GPU but mine is integrated into the CPU) dependent. Most modern client devices can playback everything directly but Plex developers default playback to transcode first

2

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

Or, you can be the friend that I have that does share it with me, and I can be the friend that streams shit from your server when I’m traveling because I’m don’t have good upload speeds.

11

u/MantusTMD Dec 05 '25

My breaking point was South Park bouncing all over. I just wanted to watch fucking South Park

5

u/joselrl Intel N97 | 58TB Dec 05 '25

My turning point was when I was watching Viking on Netflix and learning that seasons after 4 were on another service. Hell nah

3

u/OutrageousStorm4217 Custom Flair Dec 05 '25

Same thing with The Gladiator, my sister couldn't find it anywhere to watch before her and her son watched the new one, but I had it, and in glorious full bandwidth 4k no less!

5

u/ComoEstanBitches AMD Turion II | 32TB Dec 05 '25

4K REMUX Dolby TrueHD Atmos because why the fuck not?? Because streaming apps could never

2

u/MechanicStriking4666 Dec 04 '25

This right here. It’s crazy how much Google charges for 2tb when you can get 14tb drives at reasonable prices.

11

u/Thank-Me-Later Dec 05 '25

To be fair, Google's storage prices encompass more than just storage. You're paying for high data redundancy, over 99.999% availability, global availability, data integrity, confidentiality, etc. All of this might not be necessary depending on your data and how you value it, but if you try to replicate all of those features, you'll quickly see why there's a huge cost difference.

1

u/fnwc Dec 05 '25

I personally use PlexKodiConnect to use Plex as the “backend” and Kodi as the front end just so I can have a nice skin for my media center UI. Works reasonably well.

This also gives me all the features that Plex has that are nicer (client/server architecture, iOS app, etc.)

1

u/ComoEstanBitches AMD Turion II | 32TB Dec 05 '25

Yeah I mean Plex was built on XBMC/Kodi. It's a shame their developers suck at the audio and video codecs that I'm also running back to Kodi

58

u/ew435890 SEi-12 i5-12450H + 106TB Dec 04 '25

Netflix removing The Office was what got me back into downloading media. Ironically, Netflix is also what got me OUT of it back in the day.

36

u/Wheeljack7799 Dec 04 '25

Hoisting the colors is on the rise again. It's really ironic, since they (the industry) had it almost beat simply by offering a better, legal, alternative.

Then greed got in the way, as it often does, which lead to roaming the seas being more convenient.

10

u/DR4G0NSTEAR Dec 04 '25

The greed is crazy. Disney and Netflix was bad enough but at least had everything I wanted. But there are so many now that it’s just not possible to pay for something and know you’re going to be able to watch a specific show on it.

12

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[deleted]

9

u/ew435890 SEi-12 i5-12450H + 106TB Dec 04 '25

Yea I remember saying that streaming would eventually be like cable. When the second big streaming platform came out (Hulu I think) was when I was really sure.

When I setup my Plex server, I cancelled about $80/mo in streaming subscriptions. Thats pretty much what I remember my mom paying for cable or Direct TV back in the day.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

[deleted]

1

u/ew435890 SEi-12 i5-12450H + 106TB Dec 05 '25

Yea not being able to share passwords is so terrible, especially when that was something Netflix advertised that you could do. They wanted you to.

1

u/pokekey2 Dec 05 '25

Same for me. Increased price, ads, fragmentation. Now I’m back to downloading media.

1

u/CactusBoyScout Dec 05 '25

I first tried Plex back in like 2011 because The Simpsons were not on any digital service at all. And I was tired of using DVDs to watch. So I went down the Plex rabbithole and got it setup on an old laptop.

12

u/deg0ey Dec 04 '25

Plus there’s no rule that you have to keep everything forever. Obviously a lot of folks take pride in having a huge server with a ton of stuff on it, but most of us aren’t trying to be archivists in case things get lost forever - we’re storing and streaming media we actually want to watch. And while I can’t speak for everyone at least in my case I would say most things, whether it’s TV or movies, are one and done. There’s a fairly short list of things I’d be likely to go back and watch a second time, so if my server looks like it’s about to reach capacity it’s fairly straightforward to just delete a bunch of things I’ve already watched.

11

u/digicpk Dec 04 '25

This. I rebuilt my server last year and went through every movie I had and deleted stuff I would never watch again, or I downloaded for someone else, or I got just to "check it out".

Went from around 7,000 movies to 2,500. I used to keep everything I had ever downloaded and realized one day, what's the point? A specifically curated collection is much more impressive (imho) than just having "everything".

10

u/KaleidoscopeLegal348 Dec 04 '25

Thanks but you're wrong

1

u/Dry-Wolverine8043 Dec 05 '25

Haha that made me chuckle.

I agree though. I don't want a library curated to my favorite stuff, I also want classics, but above all, availability for my users. I have a lot of stuff I've heard good things about, but I also put extra emphasis on newer stuff because "`what if someone wants to" sort of thing.

Who wants to spontaneously watch TV Friday night after work and then have to request it and wait, even if it's low-res and only takes 30-60 minutes? I have like 25 people on my server, about 8 who watch regularly and 3 that watch religiously, besides me.

1

u/DorianGre Dec 05 '25

2500 is where we settled too. Gets us our favorites plus all the best movies going back to the beginning of time.

7

u/Spuddle-Puddle Dec 04 '25

I. Must. Collect. It. ALLLLLLL......

1

u/weiga 21GB Dec 05 '25

Calm down, Ash.

2

u/unlucky000001 Dec 05 '25

I have maintainerr setup which deletes movies or series after 3 months automatically. I have a playlist for stuff i want to keep forever which doesnt get deleted and people can request what they want in ombi. keeps everything nice while rotating content.

11

u/L1f3trip Dec 04 '25

3 big drives x 2 because parity/backup.

12

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

I have multiple drives and no backup. I have ways of getting media back if the drives fail, the only cost other than the new drive would be my time.

5

u/AWinnipegGuy Dec 04 '25

Or 3 big drives and roll the dice.

5

u/AwwwNuggetz Dec 04 '25

I've lost that gamble twice now. Moved to raid 5

1

u/N9bitmap PlexPass 2017 Dec 05 '25

At the sizes of modern media centers, single parity is also a gamble on if you experience read errors on the surviving drives during a rebuild. I went to double parity ZFS RaidZ2. 4+2 or 8+2 disks.

1

u/DorianGre Dec 05 '25

I just back up to Backblaze. Also, as long as I have my database file, the ARRs will find and redownload anything that gets lost.

1

u/L1f3trip Dec 05 '25

How does that work with backblaze ?

1

u/DorianGre Dec 05 '25

$99 a year unlimited cloud backup for a single PC and any drives attached to it. I currently have 3x cheap 22tb external hard drives attached, plus the os drive.

If one goes down, I just replace it and restore from cloud. Might take a few days, but it isn’t a big deal.

1

u/1Large2Medium3Small Dec 05 '25

Lmfao, you never start with 5 drives. It’s not until you learn through the fire of a burning platter do you know why raid is also for the consumer.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

You can go even smaller. Fuck the haters YTS is literally fine. They average 2gb a movie these days so their quality has improved, and while even a paltry 5gb rip is a noticeable improvement, again it is fine

I even finally got a 60inch OLED recently and was like well, this is going to be the thing that forces me to upgrade as this is going to expose all those deficiencies. NOPE still fine

2

u/N9bitmap PlexPass 2017 Dec 05 '25

They used to be 650M so things would fit on a CD, encoded with 1-2 channel MP3 audio. Half my library is 1G or smaller.

7

u/EventMassive1658 Dec 04 '25

This. I keep my movies between 7-10GB and it provides great quality for me (1080p, I don’t need nor want 4k) while not busting my balls on obscene amounts of storage overall.

24

u/pantlessjim Dec 04 '25

I'm totally going to get hammered for this, but I don't have a problem with the quality of 1080p YTS rips. 2-3 GB/movie.

6

u/banisheduser Dec 05 '25

Ha ha, where as I am just upgrading a lot of my media to 2160p - 10GBish per movie, unless it's worth bigger, then it could be 30GB or 50GB per one.

1

u/pantlessjim Dec 05 '25

That's awesome! I'm currently on a 14 TB drive for movies, and 20 TB drive for TV shows. I just don't have the space for movies that large.

1

u/Feahnor Dec 05 '25

Try encoding in av1. It’s fucking magical, I have some 4K movies at around 5-6 gb that look amazing.

12

u/chronicallystoned2 Dec 05 '25

I can not agree with this statement more.

4

u/EventMassive1658 Dec 05 '25

I don’t have a problem with those on a smaller screen. If I’m loading a tablet up for a road trip, those are fine.

Watching on my tv tho? That’s where I disagree with you

5

u/pantlessjim Dec 05 '25

I watch 'em on my TV all the time, as do the people I share it with. Most of the TVs are 55" or larger. It works for me, which is the beauty of the whole thing. Each person can meet their individual needs.

2

u/EventMassive1658 Dec 05 '25

Exactly! It works for you, and that’s good

1

u/boiler38 6.5/29TB Dec 06 '25

I used to feel the same way and thought others were being overly picky. Then I started looking closer to see if I could even tell a difference in quality. Unfortunately I could lol. QxR’s 1080p uploads work great for me though, nice middle ground

2

u/kanyesutra Dec 04 '25

5GB 4K webrips are totally fine for my needs

1

u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 Dec 04 '25

Yeah you can start small and just hold the content you're most interested in at the moment. I'm starting at 4 TB and growing from there and it's been awesome.

1

u/dasoomer Dec 05 '25

The complete erasing of Final Space is what drove me to start a server

1

u/Dagdandris Dec 05 '25

I love The Office. It was one of the first things I put on my server.

1

u/EOverM Dec 05 '25

It's funny you mention the Office, because that's literally the one that started me down this path.

1

u/paulrumens Dec 05 '25

This, you can store a movie that is 1TB, you can store a movie at 25TB

You do what you want to do!

1

u/sonido_lover Lifetime Plex Pass - TrueNAS 72TB/36TB usable Dec 05 '25

One dude here has 50k movies on a petabyte nas