Anyone with a media server out there?

[ACrzyRussian]

I have a media server running on my gaming PC, but since I dont particularly like leaving it on all the time I decided to use my tax return to build myself a dedicated media server. Just ordered most of the parts today!

Anyone have any tips/tricks? Planning on running PLEX on linux, but any input on which distro to use is appreciated. Plus any other helpful programs to use!

 

[Annitias]

I use a commercial server running Windows server. Very much so overkill for a home but we watch movies direct from the server and have 64TB of storage.

PLEX is pretty solid to start with.

 

[Stoutman]

I have been running PLEX for a couple years on my win10 streaming system. It works real well.

 

[deathstrike]

I have a low power NAS with a fair amount of drives. It's got an AMD APU and doesn't use much electricity, so there's no PLEX on it for encoding stuff, but I do run sabnzbd/couchpotato/sickbeard/etc. I like linux servers in general for this type of thing, and Ubuntu/Debian specifically. I use ZFS for my 15ish TB of storage and share it out over SMB and NFS. Then I use a tiny form factor client on the TV, and mount samba shares on my windows desktop.

If you're going the Linux route I would say look into using docker and dockerfiles for the stuff you want to run on your machine. I did all the configs/setup by hand on mine since I setup my current NAS in 2012/2013 and nothing like this was out there then. Docker would be a nice way to make the stuff you want portable (easy to move if you change servers) and isolated from one another. There are several docker images out there you can freely use, but you might not wanna trust random public images if it's anything important to you. Official images should be fine (distro bases, mysql, etc).