
Plex Media Server on Cloud - msh
https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/
======
drampelt
For those wishing to use Amazon Cloud Drive with their own Plex server
[https://amc.ovh/](https://amc.ovh/) has some great instructions. I've been
doing this with very little issues for a few months now.

EDIT: More up to date instructions at
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/)

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ben174
Wow. "Unlimited" for $60/yr. Do you think they'd be ok with me uploading my
entire 12tb library? I wasn't able to find any limits in the fine print.

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Veratyr
Plenty of people on Reddit's /r/DataHoarder have done far more than that,
easily into the tens of TBs. The problems come when you upload unencrypted
copyrighted content or try to download more than 1TB in a single day.

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throwaway91111
Wait, what happens if you upload unencrypted copyright content? I legally own
quite a bit of that, as I suspect most people do.

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stilist
Well, you have a _license_ to use the material, but that license probably
wasn't written with the intent of you streaming it from someone else's server.

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izacus
Hmm... there are laws allowing you to make backups of licensed content. Can
you explain more about how license would forbid you from storing those backups
on Amazon server?

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bryanrasmussen
perhaps streaming would in the law as a form of broadcast, thus storing it
would be fine but as the purpose of storing in that situation is to broadcast
that would be illegal (not saying that is the case, just making a reasonable
scenario)

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planetjones
I have an lifetime plex pass membership. I think it cost $120. I am not sure
how they will be able to continue to offer me plex cloud, as servers which
plex are paying for must be doing the transcoding. The bill for CPU must be
fairly hefty if people really start to use this.

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bubblethink
Maybe transcoding won't be needed eventually for a majority of users ? A lot
of media right now exists in h264 which newer devices can anyway play. Since
AV1 has broad industry support, it might be also become ubiquitous.

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lotyrin
Most of my transcoding usage in Plex isn't for a target codec or target
resolution, but for a target bitrate.

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crooked-v
This has the big limitation, at least at the moment, that the supported
providers all cap out at 1 TB for any kind of reasonably-priced storage.

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joshuata
It's also painfully slow. I've been using it for the past few months, and it
rescans my library every time I access it. Half the time it shows my libraries
as empty. Overall it feels very unfinished.

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morganvachon
I figured it would be too slow for daily use for my own needs, based on my
current setup. I have a Nvidia Shield TV as the Plex server and living room
Plex client, with a home-built NAS running OpenMediaVault for media storage.
The Shield and NAS are both connected to Gigabit Ethernet, and I occasionally
run into slowdowns if I'm trying to watch in the living room, my wife is
watching in the bedroom via Roku, and my sister-in-law across the city is
watching via her Roku. I've narrowed it down to a saturated network, the
Shield was barely breaking a sweat transcoding the files.

With that said, using the Shield as the server greatly improved our previous
streaming situation. Before using the Shield, we'd struggle to maintain two
good quality streams at once, whether both were local or one was local and one
remote. The previous server was no slouch: Core2 Quad with 8GB of DDR3 RAM,
but it seems the Shield is well qualified to handle server duties.

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voltagex_
Which CPU was it? I doubt Plex are using the latest ffmpeg, but I saw big
jumps between the i7 920, 2600k and then finally the 6800k. That said, my
current Plex box is an Atom C2758, which seems to handle 1-2 streams just fine
(1 direct, 1 transcode).

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morganvachon
Core2 Quad Q8400. That machine is now being used as a Linux/BSD testbed every
now and then, and it's still plenty fast enough for modern desktop duties.

The other concern the Shield mitigates is power inefficiency; that C2Q is a
power hungry beast, and the entire Shield box uses less wattage at full load
than the Intel CPU alone at idle.

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yellow_viper
So uh, how does this work? What's to stop me from sticking my data up there
and sharing it with 1000 friends? Where is the trancoding done?

I was a member of a private plex group with about 8TB of media. He was
constantly running into problems due to people sharing accounts, causing his
server load to become unfeasible.

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teilo
Because you would have to give your 1000 friends the Plex login to your paid
Plex account, and this would likely be noticed and your account suspended.

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bubblethink
I don't think that's necessary. They can all have their own logins. Plex
allows coarse sharing for free and more fine grained sharing in their paid
product.

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nichochar
Plex is one of my favorite services. One of those companies that makes it easy
for me to donate.

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e40
I was really annoyed, though, when they released version 1.0 and removed
access to all previous downloads. Turns out, 1.0 (on Debian) was broken and I
could no longer FF on my Roku. The forums were filled with people complaining,
but they would not make the older, good release available. After a week or two
someone provided it to me via dropbox.

You might ask why I didn't have the previous download? Because the way I was
building my plex docker container would download the latest one, directly. I
removed the previous container before I verified all features were working.
And, at that point, I wasn't backing up containers (they are stateless, so why
bother?), so I was royally screwed for 2 weeks (in terms of FF).

The fact that they are closed source, and behaved this way. It really soured
me on them.

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deadbunny
> I removed the previous container before I verified all features were working

I think I found your problem.

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ksec
I am going to assume, a lot of people are storing Copyrighted Materials.

1\. This essentially allows you to store all your favorite collection, what
happens if Google Drive decide to wipe all those out?

2\. Why not do this on a NAS?

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radiorental
> 2\. Why not do this on a NAS?

NAS boxes capable of running Plex media server are not inexpensive.

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machbio
this is a failed project - there was a lot of expectation when they initially
started with Amazon Cloud Drive..with a technical limitation that they faced
with Amazon Cloud Drive - they completely eliminated Amazon Cloud Drive from
its storage options..I called it failed, because there is no way, I will pay
loads of money to Dropbox or Google for the Terabyte of my Homelab videos..
Amazon Cloud Drive would definitely been an option - that I would consider,
since they have a fixed 60$ for unlimited data..

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Veratyr
You can get unlimited data from Google Drive and Dropbox for about the price
of 1TB, you just need to use a business account. This seems to be the main
solution for the people I know who are using this.

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sp332
Dropbox is $100/year for 1TB but $20/month for unlimited. That's more than
double.

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rckrd
Why didn't they use S3 or GCS as the backing store? Why do we need upload &
sync? Seems like you only need just upload and go.

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notatoad
Most people use Plex for pirated content. If Plex uses S3 or GCS as the
backing store, then they are hosting and delivering their users' pirated
content and opening themselves up to all kinds of legal problems. If they're
just providing a way to stream content from some external storage, they have a
lot less liability.

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cptskippy
I set this up during the Beta and it works reasonably well. Cloud Libraries
behave just as Shared Libraries do in the App. I didn't see a restriction on
the number of Cloud Libraries you can setup and they show up as available
libraries in your Plex App.

So I could see using the cloud server as a way to avoid eating up home server
bandwidth if you do a lot of remote streaming. Particularly if your ISP has
bandwidth caps. There might also be a performance benefit since cloud storage
is faster than a lot of people's upstream connections to the internet.

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dmerrick
I'm a huge Plex fan, but I'm really not comfortable using this until it
supports encryption.

I would only use this for media where you have the legal rights to copy it.

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jnagro
encryption is a mute point unless its some sort of end-to-end encrypted thing
since they host the computers.

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BillinghamJ
"Moot" point, not "mute" \-
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point)

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ClayM
Is there a good option for encrypted cloud storage that this can access?
Unless you want whoever scanning your stuff and seeing your collection of
anime...

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pgrote
This is a pretty good guide for Amazon Cloud drive:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/)

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jonursenbach
ACD no longer works with Plex Cloud.

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drampelt
With this setup you run your own Plex server and mount ACD as a filesystem.

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relics443
I've been using this since day one. It's been a bumpy ride, but the past few
weeks it's been working really well.

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rando21951
I actually wish they would add support for HDFS- it's not a bad way to combine
lots of somewhat-small (< 2TB) disks into a sizable amount of (seemingly)
homogenous storage (without having to be super clever with mount points and
hard links and BTRFS and junk like that).

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bane
Why bother? just add more directories of content to each library. Plex just
merges them all at the library level. I have crap stashed over 5 drives, just
plain vanilla USB drives, and plex handles them just fine.

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illumin8
Data protection. HDFS replicates chunks of files across 3 different drives by
default. This is configurable, but it's one of the most simple ways to protect
your data from drive failures, without the performance penalty of RAID.

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bane
yeah, that's fair.

Might want to see if the HDFS NFS Gateway works for this.

[https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-
dist/ha...](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-
hdfs/HdfsNfsGateway.html)

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supernovae
Anyone have any experience with this service yet? Do you have to re-encode
your videos? Curious since some MKV's i ripped a while ago are transcoded and
can be CPU heavy to play. Anyone know how plex cloud handles this when played
on Xbox One app or Mobile phone?

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Veratyr
The draw of Plex (cloud or otherwise) is that it handles all that for you.
It'll transcode to the correct format and even embed subtitles if you need it
to. On the backend it uses ffmpeg so it should support pretty much any format.
I think it even supports HEVC.

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Kariboupseudo
Just need for supported cloud storage to become affordable i guess...

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supernovae
OneDrive comes with Office365 which is 90 bucks a year when found on sale..
You get 1TB of cloud storage for up to 5 family members and you get Office Pro
for up to 5 PCs as well.. not a bad deal in the end.

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anthonybsd
I have around 8TB on Plex, so that won't work for me :(

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supernovae
well, you could create 5 accounts under the single master and have 5 tb
online.. for 90 bucks a year.. just use an account for each service.. movies /
tv / whatever :)

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rorosaurus
This is a massive pain, and also against the TOS. Amazon Cloud Drive is
$60/year for unlimited storage.

