I am a bit of a novice. I am curious as to whether I can set up a Plex server on something like DigitalOcean and does it make sense? Second part of the question, is it easy to do? Being a novice, a lot of this stuff goes over my head. Haven’t found anything on YouTube or Google.
Thanks in advance
Here’s a good article about this:
Yes, you could do, but no I doubt it makes sense. The entire premise of Plex is to stream your own content within your personal network. The issue with cloud hosting would be how you would get the media you wish to enjoy up into your cloud. It just strikes me as more work than it would be worth.
As for setting it up locally, if you can install any program on your computer, you can install a Plex server. It’s just a downloaded executable and you run it. That, of course, doesn’t get you very far… you need to load it up with content in order for it to be useful to you. That’s not terribly hard, but there are naming and locating rules you will want to learn (from the Plex manual pages.) Plex calls them libraries, and by default you have one for Movies and one for TV and one for Music and one for Pictures. You can have as many as you want, spread across different locations. For movies, you generally want to make a sub-folder with the movie name and year. Something like “Foo, The Movie (2019)” works well for me. In that folder you put the movie file (.MP4 for example) and any trailers, screen shots, etc. Each of the extra items has to be named specifically so that Plex can know what it is.
Thanks for your feedback. I’m getting the sense the effort/reward may not be worth it. I’m not sure I have the technical expertise to pull it off.
Thank you, however it does look the the technical knowledge and understanding may be beyond my expertise.
You could go with a pre-built setup.
Here is a reddit thread that you might want to look at.
You could always try setting up Plex on Windows. The installation process seems pretty straightforward, might be worth checking out.
Thank you! I’ll take a look.