Need help setting up Plex server- NAS vs Desktop

[arnprasad]

Hi All,

My current home setup has multiple computers and currently most of my media files are on a WD My Cloud EX2 NAS. When I bought the WD, I just wanted a two drive setup to auto backup for any drive failures since it included 20 years of invaluable home videos. Apparently it is also a NAS - I never tried to understand what all smart things it can do since I have a tough time using it as a dumb drive since most of the time, the damn NAS is so smart - my computers cannot identify it and map it as a network drive.

What do I have:

(i) a desktop at first floor which recognizes my WD Ex 2 NAS and I am able to map it as Z drive
(ii) A desktop at ground floor which cannot map my WD as a network drive
(iii) A laptop which earlier was able to map the WD has a network drive but after I upgraded my router to a dual band - this too does not recognize
(iv) Various other mobile devices like phones and tablets

Goal of my project:

Make sure my media files currently on the WD Ex 2 is accessible to all my computers and if possible even on mobile devices and even better if I can access it outside my home network. Currently apart from my first floor desktop if I want to play a file from my WD drive - I use a pen drive to copy.

Also within my home network, I want to play the media via Ethernet or Wifi and do not want to waste internet bandwidth

What I have learnt so far:

Setup a Plex media server on my first floor desktop and point it to the Z drive for media files. Use a browser on my other computers, logon to plex.tv and access my media files.

Limitations of the above process:

For this to work, I need to have my desktop on all the time.. While not a big deal in terms of power consumption, I know that Plex can be setup directly on my WD EX2 thereby saving few units of electricity.

Questions that needs clarification:

This is what I have I think

I have watched the following videos and hence have the following questions

(i) Is there a need to have Plex plug in on Kodi or can I just get rid of Kodi. I use Kodi as software to play my media files. I dont use much add-ons and all that. So should I use Plex on Kodi or only use Plex?
(ii) At around 10:00 min on the first video above - it talks about NAS servers being able to transcode and my WD Ex2 has NO all across. Why does my NAS needs to transcode? Is this a limiting factor and does that mean Plex on my NAS is useless and I stick to the Desktop Plex server?
(iii) Whether WD NAS or Desktop - how do I access my files on other computers using home network and not via internet as my understanding is that if I access Plex on browser on other computers - I use my internet bandwidth?
(iv) Plex is compatible with Alexa and it will be great if I can ask Alexa to play a movie - that will impress people. Hope it works in my current set up
(v) Assuming my WD NAS option works - do I need to have a static IP - currently I dont have any static IPs from Hathway

Tomorrow I will go ahead and try and setup following instructions from the above three videos.

Please guide me as I feel pretty dumb that in 2020 I dont even use Windows network feature to access files within my home network and have to use thumb drives!!

 

[Kannan]

One way to solve the issue of NAS dropping off from the network is to lock it's mac (hardware) address to a fixed IP on the router and then reconnect to it (ie map it) from all the PCs
VLC could be a simpler option for playback as it natively supports Samba.

 

[Mayank Shah]

Kodi works very well on a stand alone device and being open source and free, its strength lies in the numerous add ons. You can install plex add-on Kodi, but I would stick with Plex only for multi device setup for which it is primarily designed. Plex has a simpler and slicker interface, but to utilize the full potential of Plex, you have to pay for it and get a Plex Pass. Do look up at the differences between the free and paid versions to know if the paid services are really required.

(i) Use only Plex. Designed better for a multi device setup. (Media server capability is not an out of the box standard feature on Kodi but can be done).
(ii) There are basically 2 types of transcoding so to speak. NAS transcoding and Plex Transcoding. Since you are going to use a dedicated PC, don't worry about the NAS transcoding. With so many video formats around, especially big and complex ones like 4k H264, transcoding is nothing but the process of converting the video format to another one so that the playback is optimised according to the capabilities of the client device like TV and phone. However, Plex transcoding needs large temporary HDD disk space and it's preferred to have such a space on another HDD partition and not the OS C:\ Drive. If you have the time and patience you could use something popular called " Handbrake" to covert complex formats to client user friendly ones. I am not aware of the latest Plex updates, but Plex did have some issues with mov and mkv formats.
(iii) Not to confuse you, but I think if you just follow WD setup instructions and connect the Nas to your router it should be fine. Alternatively since you are happy to keep the PC on all the time, simply connect the WD to the PC and specify it as a shared drive(s). Speaking for Windows 7/10 as I am not on Apple, a little bit of settings on windows, permissions, accessibility etc will show your Nas drive over all devices on the network. Any data in an out through the router from any device(s) on the same network will not use your internet data so go ahead and stream 100's of GB of data within your network. Of course, the specs of the router is equally important to be able to handle all data within the network plus all online data ( this will consume data) so if you have a fast router ( gigabit routers are very common nowadays) then nothing to worry about. Do try to have wired LAN connections wherever possible for full and free flow of data.
(iv) I really love your childish glee about Alexa. Don't worry too much about it you will soon get over it.
(v) Your requirements will decide whether you need static IP or Dynamic IP. Generally speaking, static IP from your ISP would be required for servers etc. So don't worry about it. However, to add to what @Kannan has said, you can assign a IP address for each device so that a device gets permanently assigned in the router.

The router itself needs an IP address and typically the last digit would be 1, something like 192.168.2.1. This belongs exclusively to the router. Let's say if you had 5 devices, if you login into your router, you can see the IP address, the device name and it's MAC address. The last digits will be random as dynamically assigned by the router DHCP. You can either assign this permanently in the router so that the connection is not lost especially with WiFi devices. It can also be used as a security feature. Generally the router can assign upto 254 IP addresses for 253 devices, the first one belonging to the router in the DHCP settings. So if you have 10 devices, you can assign the DHCP range from 192.168.2.2 to 192.168.2.11, thus your router will connect only to these 10 devices.
Don't worry about Hathaway's IP. Most of us are on Dynamic IP.

Hope this makes sense. I gladly stand corrected. Cheers. Stay safe.

Edit: Do reach out to @sam9s , he is the god father of networking.

 

[arnprasad]

One way to solve the issue of NAS dropping off from the network is to lock it's mac (hardware) address to a fixed IP on the router and then reconnect to it (ie map it) from all the PCs
VLC could be a simpler option for playback as it natively supports Samba.

Hi..can you elaborate the second point pls. Assuming I cant figure out the fixed IP part until I get some help from some of my tech friends - the second point on VLC does not make sense right? as I cant access the files directly from the WD on my other desktops, then playing it on VLC ruled out..was that your point pls? I am a bit slow on the technical side of things

 

[arnprasad]

Kodi works very well on a stand alone device and being open source and free, its strength lies in the numerous add ons. You can install plex add-on Kodi, but I would stick with Plex only for multi device setup for which it is primarily designed. Plex has a simpler and slicker interface, but to utilize the full potential of Plex, you have to pay for it and get a Plex Pass. Do look up at the differences between the free and paid versions to know if the paid services are really required.

(i) Use only Plex. Designed better for a multi device setup. (Media server capability is not an out of the box standard feature on Kodi but can be done).
(ii) There are basically 2 types of transcoding so to speak. NAS transcoding and Plex Transcoding. Since you are going to use a dedicated PC, don't worry about the NAS transcoding. With so many video formats around, especially big and complex ones like 4k H264, transcoding is nothing but the process of converting the video format to another one so that the playback is optimised according to the capabilities of the client device like TV and phone. However, Plex transcoding needs large temporary HDD disk space and it's preferred to have such a space on another HDD partition and not the OS C:\ Drive. If you have the time and patience you could use something popular called " Handbrake" to covert complex formats to client user friendly ones. I am not aware of the latest Plex updates, but Plex did have some issues with mov and mkv formats.
(iii) Not to confuse you, but I think if you just follow WD setup instructions and connect the Nas to your router it should be fine. Alternatively since you are happy to keep the PC on all the time, simply connect the WD to the PC and specify it as a shared drive(s). Speaking for Windows 7/10 as I am not on Apple, a little bit of settings on windows, permissions, accessibility etc will show your Nas drive over all devices on the network. Any data in an out through the router from any device(s) on the same network will not use your internet data so go ahead and stream 100's of GB of data within your network. Of course, the specs of the router is equally important to be able to handle all data within the network plus all online data ( this will consume data) so if you have a fast router ( gigabit routers are very common nowadays) then nothing to worry about. Do try to have wired LAN connections wherever possible for full and free flow of data.
(iv) I really love your childish glee about Alexa. Don't worry too much about it you will soon get over it.
(v) Your requirements will decide whether you need static IP or Dynamic IP. Generally speaking, static IP from your ISP would be required for servers etc. So don't worry about it. However, to add to what @Kannan has said, you can assign a IP address for each device so that a device gets permanently assigned in the router.

The router itself needs an IP address and typically the last digit would be 1, something like 192.168.2.1. This belongs exclusively to the router. Let's say if you had 5 devices, if you login into your router, you can see the IP address, the device name and it's MAC address. The last digits will be random as dynamically assigned by the router DHCP. You can either assign this permanently in the router so that the connection is not lost especially with WiFi devices. It can also be used as a security feature. Generally the router can assign upto 254 IP addresses for 253 devices, the first one belonging to the router in the DHCP settings. So if you have 10 devices, you can assign the DHCP range from 192.168.2.2 to 192.168.2.11, thus your router will connect only to these 10 devices.
Don't worry about Hathaway's IP. Most of us are on Dynamic IP.

Hope this makes sense. I gladly stand corrected. Cheers. Stay safe.

One of my tech friends is bound to drop in one of these days. I will ask him to read this and explain. For now, like I explained - the Desktop that has the WD as the Z drive - am having Plex server on this and at this moment, it is refreshing the movies. For now, I will just open a browser on my other computers and watch them on Plex.tv. With 1 TB data limit from Hathway, I dont have to worry on bandwidth either.

Thanks a lot for the long reply and stay safe!

 

[Kannan]

Hi..can you elaborate the second point pls. Assuming I cant figure out the fixed IP part until I get some help from some of my tech friends - the second point on VLC does not make sense right? as I cant access the files directly from the WD on my other desktops, then playing it on VLC ruled out..was that your point pls? I am a bit slow on the technical side of things

VLC has a built in option to detect shared resources on the home network and read all the media files on it. Since you have not mentioned what is your source of playback, I assumed it was you PC, so suggested VLC.
I have VLC setup on the Fire TV stick aswell as Kodi and use either of the players to playback all video files on my NAS attached hard drive built on raspberry pi.
VLC should be able to read you network media even if the NAS is setup over DHCP instead of fixed IP unlike Windows which sometimes fails on DHCP

Setting up IP via the mac route is quite easy. Either you can login directly into your router and check the client table to find the mac address of all the devices on your network, or use an application like 'Fing' on phone or 'WNetwatcher' on PC to check the same.
Then within your router, under LAN configurations, you will have a window to assign dedicated IP address to each of the mac addresses.
You can use this window to assign it for your NAS.
Hope this helps

 

[Mayank Shah]

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