Hey all! Back with another post about my trusty Raspberry Pi.
For a while now, we’ve had an external HDD plugged into our wifi router to create a very simple network share. I had ‘acquired’ a few pieces of media to watch on the big screen (i.e our TV) and wanted a simple way to do that. A little bit of digging later I just plugged my hard-drive into my router, booted up Infuse on my Apple TV, and there was my little ‘server’. This was, and still is a viable solution for those out there who just want a painless way to access files over your home network. However, for me, it felt a little too barebones. Ultimately, it was the Infuse client doing all the heavy-lifting, and many features were locked behind a paywall. So, I kept going on with life, keeping this in the back of my mind.
Over this summer, I’d started to do a lot more with my Pi. I’d installed Pi-Hole on it, Homebridge, and started looking towards other ways I could expand my emPire (see what I did there). Eventually, I stumbled upon Plex.
After a quick read-through on their site, I realised that this was the solution I had been looking for all along. It was a painless way for me to create an actual media server where I could plug in an external drive, and it would automatically grab the metadata, all with an extremely responsive, and beautiful UI.
So! I SSHed into my Pi and installed the Plex Media Server. Once it was installed, the setup page was accessed through a web portal from a specific port on its IP address. Unfortunately, the external drive I had was in an HFS+ format, as it was originally formatted with a Mac. So, I did have to install quite a few extra pieces of software for it to mount properly (i.e read/write as it was initially stuck to read only). After the drive successfully mounted, I started the server, and it’s been painless streaming since!
The Plex client on TV looks just like another streaming service, and as you start adding your own collection, it begins to feel like one too. It’s been able to handle multiple 4K streams at the same time, but performance does sometimes suffer since the 1GB of RAM is not nearly enough for it to run optimally.
The only downside to this is that the mobile clients are 100% paid. The TV application is free however, and that’s where most of my usage is anyway.
All in all, it’s been a great experience so far. However, in the future I will look towards grabbing a more powerful Pi, maybe one with 4GB of RAM to handle remote connections as well.
Anyway, short post this time. See ya 🙂