Building my OWN BUDGET Plex Server for £20/($25)!

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[Techwen]

For all the people with the smartassed "wHeRe Am I gOiNg tO FiNd a 4tB hArD dRiVe fOr FrEe" comments, my point was that you can use whatever drives you can get your hands on. I'm not expecting that you're going to follow this guide part by part; I just wanted to document the machine I built. I can promise you that searching through local listings on Facebook marketplace, ebay and websites like Freecycle.org, it is very easy these days to come across parts for little or even no cost at all.

[philtyler]

I just run mine on a Raspberry Pi 3 and stream my media off a NAS - It can easily handle multiple simultaneous 1080p direct plays. I have Android Devices, Fire Sticks, Rokus and an XBox one as clients, none of which need any transcoding.

[reVSilverspine]

Hardware transcode requires a Plex Pass, which is significantly over the $25 budget.
My low power Plex server: AMD E350 (dual core, 18W CPU), 16 gb ddr3, 44gb boot SSD, 5tb media drive, asus optical drive for disc ripping. Total cost: $20 (this includes the Lenovo ThinkCentre that I converted to accept an Asrock E-350M1 ITX motherboard that set me back $10). ram, storage and optical drive were all e-waste salvage so they were free. OS is Windows Server 2019 DC, licensed from my University. Total power consumption is somewhere in the 45W range at 100% utilization.

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

This man didnt even watch a film on it.

[kyukyoku_]

Great video! I run my Plex server off of a Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It has a Core i5-4590, 16gb of RAM, and 6.5 TB of total storage. Amazingly, it can stream movies to my brother’s Apple TV 4K two floor levels down over my home’s wireless network with ease! One thing to note: if you ever want to upgrade to better hardware down the line, be sure to update your transcoder settings. For me, I use the “Make my CPU hurt” preset along with slow transcoding for maximum quality and speed in my use case. Keep up the great work!

[bakonyimate]

I am using a little Raspberry Pi 4 with 500gb m.2 SSD for the films/series. I am using an OS called OMV5 (open media vault 5) and I am using docker containers like transmission (for downloading and seeding torrents) and plex server ofc (and some other little things). It isn't the fastest, but it is cheap and enough just for me and for my brothers.

[Palo_din]

Damn, that's cheap. My own Plex server set me back a couple of hundred even with me recycling an old i5 2500k. I guess having spare disks lying around helps though lol, that's a good half of what I spent

As for the rest of it, I bought a cheapo LGA1155 board on ebay (Just the first one I saw that was M-ITX and supported HDMI). A WD Green 240GB SSD for boot, I shulked a 4TB external for the media drive (They're usually a good bit cheaper) and slapped it all into a Thermaltake Core V1 case. I didn't bother putting a GPU in, the CPU alone can handle a couple of 720/1080 streams just fine so it doesn't feel like there was much point in doing so.

That's been running beautifully for the past 6-7 months at any rate

[theburntcrumpet]

I know you addresses this but I would have definitely used Linux just so that I could get the most out of this older hardware - there's so much overhead on a standard copy of Windows 10 Pro

[criticallycheesycaleb]

I have a setup very similar to this.
2 systems - HP machines like the one in your video, except the Intel variant instead of AMD.
System 1: Running Windows 10 Pro, Plex Media Server, and Tonido. It has a Core 2 Quad, 8GB ram, 128GB SSD, and Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDD for media. Accessed via RDP.
System 2: Running Linux Mint 20 (I think). I use it for blu ray ripping through MakeMKV and torrenting. Core 2 Duo, 4GB ram, 128GB SSD, and 1TB HDD. Accessed via TeamViewer. Although Windows is easy to use, I would recommend Linux for this use case.

[beardedretroguy]

My server is a repurposed Windows Vista system I built back in 2009. Motherboard is a SuperMicro LGA775 board with a failing USB controller. I swapped the Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz out with a Xeon E5450 3.0GHz quad-core, modified the BIOS to include the microcode, bought a 4-stick kit of DDR2-800 for a total of 8GB, a 128GB Intel SSD, A 3TB Western Digital Green drive for SAMBA (network share folders) and an 8TB WD Red drive completely dedicated to PLEX. The OS is Ubuntu Server installed to the SSD. It boots like lightning and has no trouble with transcodes. Recently added a PCI USB 2.0 controller card so the system can be connected to a battery UPS for automatic shutdowns during power failures.

[weatheronthes]

I actually just use Handbrake to rip my DVDs to MP4s in the first place. You can rip copy protected DVDs with Handbrake with a simple file that you copy and paste. I haven't even heard of that program you used. The quality is good enough for me and I just use the highest quality 480p setting generally.

[andrewpenny]

Nice! I had a plex server, I used VLC Media Player to rip my hard copies though. Then I switched to the inbuilt media streaming in Windows (don't get the auto-tagging features or any tagging features for that matter), after a short while using that I turned to simply file sharing in windows (with SMB 1.0 turned on in Windows Features) so that VLC Media Player (for android) would connect to the windows network share (there's very few free software for Android that can connect to windows networks - even if I had to enable an old insecure legacy protocol to get it working). I took this approach because I didn't want to pay the fee that Plex asks for when connecting via a mobile device... 😅😅

[TEchWIse]

We do just love watching Alvin and the chipmunks

[BillyNoMates]

myself and a mate wrote our own webserver streaming films after i ripped all of my DVD's.
Later on I set up plex on an all in one pc with a 4TB hard drive.
Low spec with 4GB ram and a Celeron crap processor but since transcoding is not needed, the processor grunt isnt needed. works a treat.
Streams fine onto my Amazon stick with plex client installed.
Plex client installed on Ipad and my 8 inch phone. works even when I am out and about.
Currently I have 850 films (3TB used) and 400 GB of Mp3's all running under Ubuntu Mate.
I also have my own custom script written to back up all media onto another hard drive using Rsync

[eightmegsandconstantlyswap]

When the lockdown is over, I'm driving 10 hours to shout and swear at you for choosing Windows. >:|

[armstrongskyview]

Hi, could you please do a video clearly explaining the port forwarding and static ip set up. Do you need to pay for a static ip or is this something thatcan be done in software?
Thanks

[ScienceAlliance]

Nice. Congrats on 5k, awesome vid and hp office pc pog

[potmej]

Cool video, although it is not really a £20 build (4TB drive :)). You got some good bargain on that x4 cpu though! I've been thinking about a system like this but in the end I can't be bothered to rip my collection of over 2000 dvds and blurays. I have a a sff pc connected to my TV to play digital content and that's as far as my laziness will allow me to go :)

[Stunz]

Where is the intro music from? I recognize it but I completely forget

[OutLan]

You get a huge like just for the montage! LOL

Actually, the whole video was pretty informative. Thanks!