all right guys and welcome back to another ibrachor video it's a pleasure to have you
guys back it's been a while i've had to take a week off as i was starting to work on my pc
my main and only pc unfortunately was giving me some trouble so i couldn't actually do any
recording but now that's all sorted i am so keen to get back into it and i'm excited to be here
we're going to be trying something a little bit new today we're going to be going by the requests
that the community has been putting in for us in our discord now if you're not sure our discord is
a pretty live community there's a lot of people in there with some great knowledge and if you're
interested the link in the description is always there so that you can join and thanks for their
suggestions we've got a couple today that we're going to be doing in today's video we're going
to be going through tuning your plex there's many settings and plex there's many different options
but we're going to show you how we like to do it here at ibracorp we've been using plex as
our main media server for up to 30 users for pretty much close to three years now
on top of that we're also going to be looking at ram transcoding so we're going to get you set up
on your android server so that you can use your ram to help with transcoding content and this
allows you to reduce those read writes to your disk and have them running in your ram instead
so if that sounds interesting and you want to learn more stay with us and let's get into it
okay guys so we're going to assume that you've got plex installed but you want to make the fine
tuning changes that we're going to show you today so what we'll do first is we'll actually start in
unraid so that we can have our template ready and then we can come back to plex and we'll start fine
tuning some of those settings so let's head back to our unread server and we'll go from there so
here we are we're on our main server zeus so we'll head over to our docker tab once you're
in your docker tab look for your plex install in my scenario here i'm actually using the official
plex media server container and that seems to work really well so i've just been using that forever
basically so i have no need to really change it if you watch a hard linking video there is some
changes that you will have to make if you haven't already and the main one is where you map your
media to so as you can see here we've got a media mapping to slash data media and then over here in
the host path it's going to our user data and media folders so if you're not aware that's the
first thing that you should probably change and that just allows you to have that content come up
and utilize your hard linking features so that's all explained in our hard linking video if you're
interested in that under show more settings here there is a change that i would like to recommend
and i learned this from the community as well so by default you'll have mnt forward slash user
forward slash app data that works fine but the amount that plex actually pumps in and out of
that folder you're actually better off having it sitting on the cache so that it's always on the
cache and then when you don't need it anymore you can just blow that away if you need to so pretty
much really easy just change it from user as you can see in this folder here it's usually user
we're just going to change that to cache all right so just have that as cache and you should be fine
that way we can always make sure the config's there don't worry if it's an existing setup
nothing's going to happen if you do that it might re-trigger a couple of scheduled tasks but you'll
be fine now the part you can't see here is where we do our ram transcoding now there's
different methods and i've been searching and i found that there's different ways people do this
i'm going to show you the way that i've decided to go with and it's been working for me
now i've tested for about a month or so so in the container template just go to advanced view up in
the top right corner here once you've got the advanced view scroll down to extra parameters
now if you followed other guides or maybe you already knew this but if you're trying to use
your cpu in order to do the transcoding for you as a graphics option then you need to have this
first part in there the hyphen hyphen device equals forward slash their forward slash dri
and that allows it to actually tap into the cpu and use that all we're going to add then next
to this is hyphen hyphen mount space type equals tmpfs comma destination equals forward slash tmp
comma tmp fs iphone size equals and then a size in bytes so the first thing i'll let you know is the
the size and bytes that you're going to have to put here is going by your server on my server here
for example i've got 48 gigabytes of ram so what this number converts to is about 20 gigs and then
after that another important one is this hyphen hyphen no hyphen health check now back to the
ram transcoding thing here so i'll just explain to you what's happening so basically we are telling
it to mount a directory and we're saying the directory is forward slash tmp so make sure you
note that down because we're gonna have to put that in plex when we get to plex now once done
with all that you can just apply it and restart the container so in the background we'll actually
now map that location for us so that's pretty much it in here once you've made those changes we
can now go into plex and we'll start going through plexus settings and we'll fine tune it together so
let's go ahead and do that okay guys so the first tab we're going to start on here is remote access
now as you can see in remote access we have a port that we've designated in plex to say this is the
port we want to communicate on the public port so that if we're coming in from the outside of our
network hit us on 32 400. now by default it's 32 400 you have the option to change that and
customize anything you like if you're not sure how to do that i will be doing a video with our
unified dream machine we're going to do a review on that since it's been a close to a month now
i'm using that so i'll be walking through how to do all the ports and a bunch of other networking
stuff as well so once you've got that then you go into your internet upload speed so what's your
maximum upload speed or the speed that you want to set for plex to be the maximum now in my case
it's 40 megabytes per second and then i'll set the remote stream to 20 megabytes per second so
i don't want to go any higher than that per stream as you can see here plex will say it will operate
within this boundary so pretty straightforward once you have all that stuff set up move on but
if you're having trouble with the remote access don't always rely on this little green tick or
this telling you that it's working sometimes it'll say it's not working but it actually is so if you
were to retry it it will probably work always best to test on your phone you know take it off the
wi-fi and just check it on your 4g or 5g whatever it is and in the library here we've got a few
options to go through so let's have a look scan my library automatically that's fine so if you
were to add one file it'll just scan through plex run a partial scan when changes are detected again
when it detects a change it will do that we're not doing music libraries for mine but yours may be
different scan your library periodically so i have at least once a day just to go ahead and do that
now here's one of the important ones that i learned from our member disc duck over on discord
with this option here if you untick it and you make changes and that file is no longer around or
the metadata has changed plex will actually show you a red trash icon over the items indicating
that the item is either can't be found or doesn't exist anymore this is actually very useful when
you are doing very very large changes on your file server for plex or moving your media around
now for example i went through an operation where i basically renamed all the files using sonar and
radar every file that you change plex considers that a new file or a new media content so what
it does is it deletes what it previously had and now enters this new one as if it was a new item
that's been added the problem with that is it then triggers other jobs such as creating thumbnails um
if you have the video thumbnails it will probably trigger that too skipping intro feature so it'll
generate all that stuff again well we don't really want that that's just going to take up server
resources i learned that the hard way basically my server was stuck for about a day and a half as it
continued its work what is recommended actually is you come in here you untick this hit save and
then go make your match changes to your server do whatever you have to do when you're done come back
and click empty trash automatically after every scan then when the scan runs it will actually say
oh okay this file is gone but then it finds it straight away so that's a handy tip for you if
you're making match changes i really recommend you do this it will save you a lot of heartache
and a lot of stress on your servers once you're done turn it back on and then you know small
changes and that can be managed by plex a lot more easily so we'll just leave it back to what it was
i personally do not use video preview thumbnails i honestly i don't find them that useful for example
you know if you mouse over the thumbnail for my video here you'll see that youtube will show you
little chapters in there and that just takes up more space and cpu usage so it's really up to you
the intro video markers is definitely something i like to do which is pretty handy generate chapter
thumbnails i'll leave that as a scheduled task audio tracks for loudness as a scheduled task as
well and the location of visibility so this will have metadata for your location i like my privacy
so i'll set that to admin home that's your library settings there done and just remember we've got
show advanced up here ticked in the right corner guys so if you're not seeing these options that's
probably why so just make sure you show advanced options so under network we've got a few options
and we don't need to change too much probably the most important one here is maximum remote stream
so if you're having a few people that you've invited to your server family and friends you
might want to limit how many individual accounts can stream at the same time and that just helps
avoid account sharing and things like that so for my users i'm happy for them to have two
depends what works for you custom server access that's our url that we have configured so that
if we wanted to hit our plex directly we can actually just go to that address
transcoder and this is going to be the big money maker right here in the transcoder settings you'll
see this transcoder temporary directory forward slash tmp that's what we mapped in the container
template in the extra parameters field so we're just going to put the exact same thing which is
slash tmp which is already there for me that way plex will use that directory and you notice it
says that it's for temporary files so the beauty of it is instead of writing all those individual
temporary files to your cache or to your array then you're going to send them all the way back
and then they're just going to be deleted cut down on that read write or you know all that wear and
tear on your system can basically be avoided so in our case we're just going to set that to tmp
that way plex will just ride it to the ram and it will sit in the ram and it's
got instant access to it and it also just cuts it off when it doesn't need it anymore
i've got the transcoder default throttle buffer here set to 120 seconds so basically two minutes
and that means that i'll allow it to buffer two minutes ahead and then it'll throttle down so that
it's not constantly throwing up on your cpu if you had to do that the background transcoding i've got
on medium at the moment enable hdr tone mapping is checked if you are using your cpu for transcoding
make sure you check the use hardware acceleration when available now i believe this is a plex pass
feature so if you don't have plex plus you may not have this option or you may not be able to select
it but it's basically one of the most important features there is because using your cpu to
transcode is immensely helpful same goes for video encoding and then we have the maximum simultaneous
transcodes so there is a lot of misunderstanding on transcoding and direct plays what this option
is saying is you can have 15 people using the transcode option while they are watching so
if their client that they're using tv or xbox or whatever it might be doesn't natively support the
format of the media content it will then become transcoded and plex will change it on the fly
to match the client so that they can watch it that is considered a transcode the alternative is the
client supports it fully in which case then it is a direct play or a direct stream and that is not
counted as part of this number so just something important to remember this is only referring to
trans codes and the reason why is because that's going to be the most intensive part of any media
streaming on your cpu is the transcodes the direct plays actually have little no impact the only
impact a direct player will have is on the actual bandwidth which is much more easier to manage
so often i'll actually ask my users to make sure that their quality is at full or as high
as possible and that's because it puts less strain on my server so once you've got all that hit save
then you have extras now this is a pretty cool one i actually put off using it for quite a while
but as you can see here you can actually put your own pre-roll video and i'm pretty sure
this might be yeah these these guys here are plex pass this one i don't think it is maybe
but basically i've put one of my video intros into my movies folder and i've mapped it like so
and i'll show you what that looks like here if we just go to one and we'll go with this one here
as you can see this is my pre-roll video right now
and plex plays that automatically before the start
of the movie and then it'll start kicking off the movie
so pretty impressive if we go back to settings now if you go down to libraries you've got your
libraries there so obviously if you guys have watched my hard linking video and you've made
changes to where the directories are for your content you need to modify them here so under
folders you can see slash data slash media movies so we can make sure it's looking in the right
location and you want to make sure you do that for all of those so guys that's my plex settings
i hope that helps you guys get yourself sorted and get some ram transcoding going your life will
change once you do it it really really reduces the impact on your server and on your disks
so they'll be thanking you later for it so make sure you get out there and you give it a go
i think it's well worth it if you enjoyed this video don't forget to give us a like
and subscribe really appreciate it share it around if you can and we'll see you in
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you