5 Ways to optimize your Plex Media Server

In today's video, let's talk about five different methods you could use to

optimize

your

Plex

media

server

. Now it could be for a very powerful Plex

media

server

or something a little cheaper. Plex media server has many options, many

ways

. to set up

your

own Plex media server, but I've compiled a short list of 5, to be exact, of

ways

to help

optimize

your Plex media server to potentially run a little better. Now some things to keep in mind here are my Plex media server on a personal level. it actually runs on an unclassified server, my current server is called low profile, which is a very large, powerful and expensive

plex

media server/non-elevated server that I built, if you don't know, I definitely recommend watching some of my videos , but even though my personal server is running unrated doesn't mean that these five methods I'm talking about today can't be used on any Plex media server installation, well, almost any media server installation Plex, for example, Nvidia Shield, like there are so many things. you can do more than just add, but you will understand later, well, with that said, let's move on to number one: the quality of your transcoder in your settings, under your transcoder settings, without having to show advanced settings, you can see options to change your transcoder.

The quality settings now for most people are set to automatic and for the most part it should automatically work perfectly. However, there are two scenarios here where you might want to change this to optimize the way your server runs based on your hardware, so if we look at this from a budget standpoint, if you built a server cheap, you don't have much power backing your Plex media server, so transcoding files can be a daunting task for your server, and while Plex should automatically default to a higher speed, you can go here and change the quality to optimize speed, so select prefer higher speed encoding from the drop-down menu.

Now, what this means is that the Plex transcoder will reduce your quality just a little; in fact, you may not even be able to do it. Note, but the quality will drop a bit in favor of a faster transcoding speed, so let's say if you have a server and you can do 9 transcodes and now you can get 10 transcodes, but each one. Transcoded video files may be slightly lower quality. Note that this setting does not change hardware-accelerated transcoding, so if you are using a graphics card to transcode files on your Plex media server, this doesn't matter, so don't worry. about it, but let's say you have a more powerful server or a super powerful server.

You can also change this to prefer higher quality encoding or cause your CPU to be damaged. Now this is the opposite of what I just mentioned, which means that the transcoder in Plex is working. to improve the quality of your transcoded files, but doing so is going to make your server work a little harder, so if you choose something like crash my CPU, you're going to get the highest quality transcoded files possible from your server, but it's going to make your CPU will be damaged by doing so, hence the name, so if you have a super powerful server and you want the best encrypted files possible, your CPU will be damaged.

If you have a budget server, you'll probably prefer the higher one. speed from encoding number to transcoding from RAM now, when you trance encode a file on your Plex media server, those temporary files have to go somewhere now most of the time, depending on your installation, those temporary files just They will go to wherever you install the Plex media server app. like for example in Windows if you install it on your C drive it will just go to your C drive; However, it is quite simple to go into

plex

and manually configure where you want your transcoding directory to be and this is where Ram transcoding can not only improve the speed of your plex media transcoder but can also help save the life of your plex media transcoder. from the SSD, so I really hope you don't, but there's a chance you'll transcode your media to a spinning HDD if you're doing so well. probably super slow, but at least your hard drive plugin will outlast your SSD;

However, if you have a slightly better server or are a little smarter with how you set it up, you could have everything up and running right now. to your SSD, which means that your plex media server is transcoding very quickly because you can write those files repeatedly and read them without any major delay because that's what SSDs do: they go fast, but they transcode to an SSD depending on how often you use your plex media server can definitely wear out that SSD a little faster than it normally would have worn out, that's why Ram transcoding is a better option if you meet a few things, you need to know how To do so, each operating system is different.

Anything from FreeNAS to Windows Unread will require a different way to set it up and this video won't tell you how to do it. I personally use unrated. I set my transcoding folder to /tmp and from under a top sort system it runs in memory, the temp folder is in memory, so when I set - /tmp it just automatically transcodes everything to RAM. I have 32 gigs of RAM so for the most part it runs smoothly to give you an idea. nothing transcoding 32 gigs of ram on my server I was using 21% ram I went in and found the largest 4k video file and transcoded it to a 20 megabits per second file and played four of them and went from 21% plus to 39 % so I still had a lot of progress and was just burning up my CPU.

I disabled hardware accelerated transcoding for this, but the point is that with 32 gigs of RAM I was able to transcode 4 large 4k video files loaded into RAM and it will still only be at 39%, but at the end of the day, this is exactly what that Ram is intended for temporary files. It's fast, it's not going to break down as quickly on an SSD. Is this literally what Ram has to do to set up his plex? media server to use a RAM disk or use RAM in any way possible for transcoding will do nothing but speed up your server and prevent some of your hardware from burning up, so whatever your operating system, access Google maybe even search on YouTube.

I might even have a video where you can set up a RAM transcoding for the background x264 encoding of your Plex media server number 3. Now this is actually kind of a new focal point for me because I started traveling and when you travel , on a plane you don't have Wi-Fi unless you pay for it, even then it sucks and definitely not something you want to rely on if you're only flying for three or four hours and want to be able to watch something. your Plex media server without having to worry about any kind of connectivity issues, basically the last three times I traveled I took a tablet and used Plex Sync to download episodes of a TV show I was normally watching Star Trek and then I would have those files on top so I can start plex and just play them locally, but I've actually been in a situation where I used Plex's sink feature.

You know, I basically downloaded a season or a set of episodes and because I did it a little too soon, I ended up watching most of them and had to come back almost at the last minute to download them before I left for the airport. Well, in your transcoder settings on your server, if you click on Advanced, you'll see the option to change some of these settings for this background processing, now their settings range from ultra-fast to very slow, and just like the settings previous ones that I talked about for your transcoder, in terms of damaging your CPU or preferring a higher speed, it changes the quality in In exchange for speed, I have the advantage of having a powerful server, so, although mine was in the last minute, I was able to download a full season of Star Trek and it really didn't take that long, though, if you're someone who has maybe a slower server.

You can always change this to a faster setting, so if you're downloading stuff for travel or for your kids, maybe your cartoons, it doesn't matter how good the quality is, you just need something for your kids to have something to watch. while you are. on the road or something, you can change this to be faster if you need to to save some time, but of course on the opposite end of that spectrum, if you're willing to wait or just have a powerful server. You can change this to a slower setting and you can transcode higher quality video files and then sync them to your mobile device and simply enjoy better quality because of that.

Now this will affect a couple of things on your mobile synchronization, of course, as I was talking about. but it will also affect your optimized videos, optimized videos or where you can go in and basically pre-transcode a video file if for some reason you know someone is going to be watching something and you don't want to transcode it on the fly, you know? that they're going to be watching a video file at about 2 megabits per second, you can go on there and you can pre-transcode and optimize that video file for them that way they're not reliant on real-time transcoding capabilities that are not part of this video just saying it's one of the things that will affect this setting so depending on your fastest server setup or enough time change this if you want better quality or if you want faster speed for generating preview thumbnails video now again.

Settings of your Plex media server within the library tab, you have the option to generate thumbnails of video previews. Now, these preview thumbnails are, in my opinion, a very great feature, however, they come at a cost; The first cost, of course, is that Plex has to parse literally every part of this video to generate these little thumbnails of videos that you know from little sections of your movies or TV shows and it adds a huge amount of space to your metadata directory. from Plex. Each little video thumbnail has to be a little image if you want these video thumbnails and you're willing to have an SSD or a storage medium for your metadata that's big enough to handle these extra files, then you can go in there and you can set it up. and run it as a scheduled task at a certain time. when you know your server is not in use or you can schedule it to run automatically whenever media sources are added.

I personally have a powerful server so I just wanted to start working on video preview thumbnails every time I add something to my server. That's the way I set it up on the whole opposite spectrum, although if maybe you have a cheaper server or you just don't have enough storage space or you know you don't have enough power to want to deal with these thumbnail previews, you know , then you can turn this off completely, you miss out on the feature of being able to scroll through your timeline and see basically a thumbnail of what it would be like if you clicked on it, but in exchange, one of you uses your server resources. generate these and you wouldn't have to know to look for that extra space for your Plex, you created a data directory to store them, so again depending on your server configuration you could have them run all the time or disable them. completely, of course, you can also run them as a scheduled task, it all really depends on your server, but again, it's still a good focal point and way to optimize your Planks media server and last but not least, Plex metadata number five is stored on an SSD I know this may seem extremely obvious to people, but it's still something that comes up from time to time and I feel like I have to say it again, just like the transcoding directory hosted on your RAM or even an SSD on a turntable.

Having all your Plex metadata stored on an SSD is a huge speed boost for your Plex media server. I mean it's huge okay it's a huge upgrade like literally think back to the time or we had spinning hard drives running our Windows operating system and then you upgrade a crappy old computer running a hard drive, upgrade it to an SSD and then all of a sudden it boots five times faster and like your whole world changes with the speed of this computer because you upgraded it to an exactly the same SSD. An experience can be had if you are running Plex from a spinning hard drive.

Now again, it all depends on your setup, but I personally run a single dedicated SSD just for unrated Plex, which meansI install all my Plex metadata and everything I need. a single SSD and that SSD is not used for anything else, not transcoding, not any other application data, no other files, it has literally only been used for Plex. If you are on Windows, you can install Plex to your C drive, where it runs. an SSD, but you can still map a separate Plex SSD in Windows to run completely separate from your boot OS SSD, which is really cool and here comes another benefit of doing this if you simply run two SSDs in RAID one where basically you have an exact copy of all your files stored on these two SSDs, if by chance one of your SSDs goes down you can go in there, you can swap that SSD and save all your metadata without having to worry about any kind of initial backups .

I always recommend backing up your stuff, but if you lose all that metadata, your entire watch history and everything you've ever done will be erased. If you have to start over, it's not necessarily the end of the world, it's more of a personal preference, but everything. those banners you changed, everything you downloaded configured matched everything that can be deleted and if you have a large library it could be a huge task to get back to where you were before not only is it a giant leap in performance but it is also a way to add a little redundancy to your Plex metadata so you can avoid some data loss in the future, so that's all for today, five different ways you could use to optimize your Plex media server to get it running a little Better depending on your situation do you have a super powerful Plex Media Server.

Great, maybe you want to change some of these higher quality settings or maybe you just have a server that's a little cheaper, which is completely fine, but if it doesn't run as fast as you. If you want or need it, hopefully some of these settings I gave you today will allow you to change that, so now I'm asking the audience if you have any additional ways to optimize or make likes work better, post them in the comments next. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on ways to optimize your Plex media server, as always, thanks for watching, like and subscribe below and have a great day, but RAM is for them, oh Jesus.