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Is VPS for plex a good idea?
I was wondering if there are any good VPS options to stream content via plex. I tried getting a cheap dedicated from OneProvider (Atom C2350 processor) but it can't even direct stream 4k for some reason.
I have an SX lane from hetzner that handles everything else. So I'll just connect the vps to it for better peering.
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Plex is CPU intensive, so Atom might not be the best.
If you transcode only.
Why not use Plex straight off SX server?
Depending how how powerful your players are
For legal reasons related to copyright ?
Hetzner does not care if its used in private trackers. Their rep even confirmed this on LET forums. As for the morality of copyright.. Do any of you really even care? I have Netflix and Amazon Prime subscription yet I also have personal Plex server. Sure, it wont make it right, but it satisfies my vanity and helps me sleep well at nights.
If you claim to use Plex for "home videos" without downloading any "unofficially sourced" movies or shows, everyone will call bullshit on it.
As for manually ripping your DVD's and Blu-Rays to upload that content.. Why bother? you break even more laws by decrypting the AACS-protected content and making the copy available in your media center as digital version.. Not to mention its slow as fuck compared to just getting a pre-encoded version.
Moral of the story is.. Everything is allowed as long as you don't get caught.. Don't cause problems for your provider and keep your media centers and torrent clients private. And never use public sites to grab any torrent or magnet links.. Otherwise you are just shitting on your provider.
as for the SX servers.. They are ideal for plex usage. Enough RAM to make Plex user /dev/shm for playback directory and temporary file storage. Tons of local space for content. And finally. Intel Quicksync enabled iGPU that allows up to 30x 1080p streams concurrently to be hw transcoded. Do not underestimate P630 iGPU
I had plex running on 512MB buyvm vps without transcoding. Jellyfin is even a bit lighter on the RAM usage.
Plex works fine on a VPS, and as long as you don't make it public for the world to see, you aren't doing anything 'illegal". The only thing you need to be mindful of is your CPU and network usage if you're using a VPS.
If you set up your Plex server by having another server do the "feeding" of content, ie "doing the dirty work of acquiring the videos", then the two run completely independent of each other since both are 2 very different use cases.
I have a dedicated server that Plex runs on (as well as a bunch of other things) but all of the torrenting/nzbing is done on a VPS in a Romanian village.
I use Plex on a VPS but just for music (a lot of which I ripped myself from CDs before moving to another country, so that I didn't have to bring a big pile of CDs with me when travelling).
Works fine for that use case, and should work fine for TV shows and movies as long as you're using direct play, or at least direct stream, as then all it's doing is taking bytes from disk and sending them directly over the network, which takes very minimal CPU power.
For transcoding you'll want dedicated CPU power (eg BuyVM's plans with 4GB RAM and above, ideally at least the 8GB one as that gives you one core rather than just one thread)
Servarica have some VPS plans where you get access to a GPU (AMD FirePro s7150), which is great for video transcoding, as GPUs handle graphics stuff far better than CPUs do. It's an interesting offering and I haven't seen many hosts that have something like that. https://servarica.com/clients/store/gpu-offers. Some Intel Xeon processors also have an integrated GPU and therefore support Intel Quick Sync.
P630? Which SX would that be?
I do, but some of my friends couldn't play anything when I enable CDN for some reason.
Thats strange. Can they access it with VPN? If so, then there is something wrong with their ISP and the CDN you are using.
They replaced the mid tier SX-line with ryzen apparently. It was W-2145 before.
The weird thing is they live in the same neighborhood I live in with same ISP. so I think the issue is on their side
2145 also doesnt have integrated GPU
I think it was Xeon 2278G or better. but im sure it has iGPU back then.
edit: nvm. it was Intel® Xeon® E3-1275 v5 for the sx63. so that was the only one with igpu
I have a small Emby server at home powered by:
it plays 4K just fine
I guess I'll give it a shot with either a vps or another cheap dedicated with better cpu. Thanks
Any modern CPU with iGPU will work just fine.
Bandwidth is a factor for a smooth 4K playback with direct play
I run this at home with 1 Gbps (F-D)
Good Luck
Just use it without encoding like direct stream and any good vps provider would work proper provided it's location. I am unfortunate I live in remote nation where there is no sign on vps nearby.
It's better if you can even try to use jellyfin it's quite light source than Plex, I don't know about emby haven't used one but sure by the forums it's lighter than Plex.
Does CDN helps for fast peering? Is there any easy way to install CDN? I HAVEN'T TRIED EVER. If it's worth I will give a shot.
Depends on how good the peering is between your origin server and the CDN nodes, and how long the nodes will cache the content for. If the CDN nodes frequently evict the content from the cache, it'll be less useful.
How do I ensure this? Do I need to install CDN and watch for any logs?
Cloudflare changes everything. I had some buffering issues before, after putting it behind cf it was so smooth.
want to stream 4k make sure your VPS has good peering to the storage server, my storage server is in us which take care of us users & ovh vps for rest of the world
Using Cloudflare for primarily video or image content is against the ToS, and they'll eventually suspend your account and block you from creating new ones.
They only allow use cases that are primarily video if you have a paid Cloudflare Stream addon for the account. On free accounts they only allow a small amount of video - the data transferred through their network must be primarily website content (HTML, CSS, images).
From their ToS:
You'd have to check the server-side logs to see if videos are still being requested from your origin server (meaning the CDN edge nodes are not keeping your video content in the cache)
Yeah you are right and I'm aware. The DNS routing helps a lot. There are guides on how you can tweak this so that images/videos won't get cached by cf.
Thw choice of plex server should match the audience.. so no need for CDN in my usage..
How can you add cloudflare to plex and also use it on smart tv?
I have a vps that is cheap, it is not very efficient, but if I play files with the cdn from a site I know I never buffering, instead with plex I always have buffering ... playback is direct because the files I have are pre-encoded
Tks