Plex media server setup

General Discussion
1

Hi there, I’ve finally gathered all parts required for building my very own plex setup on raspberry Pi 3b+ which will be having 1tb external 2.5inch hdd before i start building I’ve couple of questions that I’d like to find answers for.

  1. What fs should i use for external hdd to i can unplug it and use it with non linux system ie ext4 or ntfs???
  2. Since it will also be a nfs server should it suffice with nfs or should i use samba as well my primary os is windows.
  3. How to set dietpi to boot from hdd and do i need to create other partition for it???

Not related bt a question in my head, can we stream the retropie running on a headless raspberry Pi to android or pc???

2
  1. exFAT and NTFS will work on Windows as well, ext4 not. exFAT ist optimized for flash drives, but you can’t move dietpi_userdata to it, since no POSIX file permissions are supported. This only works with NTFS.
  2. NFS can be used on modern Windows as well, although you need to actively install the related client via Control Panel > Programs & Features > Enable/disable Windows features > NFS service or similar. Samba works as well, but it is more resource hungry and I would only use NFS or Samba, based on client requirements, never both. So looks like NFS-only is best choice in your case.
  3. On RPi you can move the root fs to an external drive. But it needs to be an ext4 file system. So if you want to have it on the same external drive as above, then jep, you need a separate ext4 partition then. But the boot partition will and needs to stay on SDcard, AFAIK.

About streaming:

  • Theoretically it should be possible. Remote desktop via e.g. VNC has not enough performance, I guess. It is possible to install an Xserver on Windows systems and run graphical programs on remote client by this. PuTTY allows X11 forwarding via SSH and I guess, since the Xserver runs on the client, this would be best solution to run games.
  • I had such a setup once, but honestly don’t remember exactly. Search the web for “Windows X11 forwarding” and “Android X11 forwarding” respectively.
3

Thanks for your help sir. I’m happy to have got reply.
Regarding booting from usb i guess i can use a usb stick and format it to ext4.the one issue I’m not sure how to tackle is the plex data folder as it grows with the library and that is the biggest concern for me rn. Hope you can provide some help. Thanks again :+1::+1:

4

Hello

Kind of a similar case here.

I have PMS installed on dietpi (odroid xu4) and trying to figure out how to mount my 2tb usb hdd so that plex would see it. I formatted it to exfat on my mac - no go. Plex only sees the the folder but no subfolders. I thought it would be read n write type of permission problem but since I gave permissions to all I do not know what to do next.

Any help would be appreciated
Thanks in advance

5

Please check the permissions of the drive. You cannot adjust them since this is not supported by exfat, as mentioned above. cd into the drives root and do: ls -al

So Plex data and library can only be (easily) moved to drives with UNIX permissions support, exfat btrfs f2fs and such. Otherwise you have to run Plex with root permissions (not recommended) or mount the drive with the Plex user.

6

Just playing around with Dietpi and happy to help somebody already :slight_smile:

  1. Format your external HD as ntfs.
  2. Run command: ‘sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g’
  3. Ensure HD is plugged in, run command: ‘sudo blkid’ and look for the LABEL of your external HD.
  4. sudo nano /etc/fstab
  5. Enter a line: LABEL=Seagate /mnt/Seagate auto nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000,noatime 0 0
  6. Make sure you have created a folder inside /mnt called ‘Seagate’ or whatever you want.
  7. Reboot, and hope to god you’ve done it right. Any mistake and it won’t boot.

Good luck amigo!

7

Or you use dietpi-drive_manager which does all these steps automatically :wink:.