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VPS for Emby or Plex
Hello,
I want to create a Media server for personal use (family, 3 or 4 concurrent user max). I'd like to use Emby or Plex to share my media library.
The requirements are:
- 25-30$/year max
- CPU with capacity to transcode @720p - 4 Mbps
- Use google drive as storage (where I have my media library)
- UE zone
I think I need up to 4TB bandwith usage for the first indexing of my library plus the daily usage (4Mbps stream, 3 hour of usage per user, 4 users)
Not much local storage needed.
Software to feed my library (sonarr, radarr, transmission) and torrent traffic allowed
Use of docker optional.
Do you think that this exist? Can you recommend some provider?
Thaks in advance
Comments
Plex / Emby requires quite a lot of CPU power when trans-coding.
So, I would say your budget is too much ... try reducing it
$25-$30 per month would be realistic. You're not going to find a VPS that meets your requirements at your requested price point. Bytesized Hosting has decent and affordable offerings, but definitely not in your budget.
Thanks for the comments. I supposed that It was like searching for an unicorn.
Plan B. What about RaspPi 3 for a server hosted @ home? Would be sufice?
Vultr 5usd per month sufficient to stream to 3 user. I have 2 file version which is 1080p with > 10 Mbps bitrate and 720p/1080p with less than 6 Mbps bitrate.
I can direct play or direct stream to 3 user simultaneus. I am saying in advance, prepare your library or it will be TRANSCODING, and it will kill your vps performance.
It's been a while but I had good luck running Plex on a Scaleway 1S VPS. They bill hourly so you can try it out for a day or two and see if it meets your needs without taking much of a hit (€0.008/hr- max charge of €3.99/mo).
As chocolateshirt mentioned, make sure to direct stream your content if possible to avoid any unnecessary transcodes. The server was able to direct stream 5+ simultaneous ~4mbps streams but struggled to transcode more than one stream at a time. IMO try to make sure all the content you share is under 4mbps to begin with and you'll mostly avoid the need for any transcoding.
I don't know how much CPU power that is for the transcode , but you still have to consider with this kind of price , you wouldn't have dedicated resources , which means you are not allowed to watch it like an hour or so.
I would consider using Hetzner Cloud CX21 which would give you 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, and 20 TB of bandwidth. This should be enough for your transcodes, although you would do better with direct play. I have personally ran Plex instances off this (with GDrive as a backing) successfully. Keep in mind you'll need to keep your GDrive Cache to around 24-30GB for cached content and this should be around.
$68/year, which is double your budget. You could try to suffice on the CX11, but might run out of space or encounter buffering. That'd bring you to $34.92/year.
Lol good luck finding a VPS that can handle transcoding with your budget.
I recommend you just buy a second hand dell workstation with a i7 or Xeon for $120 ~ and fill it up with hard drives and it'll work out much cheaper than renting out a dedicated server/VPS that can support your needs.
If you can increase your budget and have to use a external server you'll be spending at least $10 per 720p transcode a month (VPS) or $7 per 720p with a i7 auction server from hentzer.
You need a decent modern CPU for media transcoding. The rpi has no balls for transcoding. It would be able to serve up the content easily, just the video processing is not what that chip was designed for.
"too much", "reducing".
I don't think those words mean what you think it means.
I'd say let your local device handle the tanscoding if your budget isn't enough for a VPS with powerful cores.
Install nginx then enable autoindex and http_auth_basic. Upload your videos to the website root. Drag the video link from your browser to your video player(VLC or Potplayer) and it will automaticly start to play in a second or two.
I think @wa44io4 said "reducing" ironically, just joking.
This work for me, but my wife and my sons can't handle it, too much work
I'm thinking going local with a solution "all-in-one", like http://www.openflixr.com
On cloud or vps, I'd go with the same software but installed locally, because I think cheap vps don't allow docker.
I've contacted letbox (I had a VPS some time ago) and they say that they can offer me a server for 30$/year with this specifications:
What do you think?
I think any VPS with large storage would be fine if you don't need transcoding on the server side. I used something similar to openflixr before but I've switched to my custom solution: Aria2+AriaNG for downloading videos and FTP server+Potplayer for streaming videos. 256MB RAM and old processor is enough for me.