You can see my service account below named Plexsvc Open the Windows computer management console (compmgmt.msc) and create a user account to run the Plex service. The only downside to skipping this step is that you will need to leave a user permanently logged in for Plex to work. If you need Hardware transcoding skip this step. I’ve had some feedback from the Plex community that this step will actually stop you from being able to use Hardware Transcoding. Wait for the installer to finish and then click close Once you have the installation file downloaded run the installer and click Install Installationįirst you will need to download Plex Media Server from here. If you are a free Plex user you can just skip any steps that don’t apply to you. A lot of the features in this guide make use of the Plex Pass which is a paid subscription. We will configure the running of Plex as a Windows service later on.

By default Plex runs in the profile of a logged in user. This guide will run through the entire process of setting up a working Plex Media Server in Windows. In later posts I will discuss how to monitor with Tautulli and how to setup Sonar to dynamically add content. (though the geek in me complains about how slow the machine is any time I have to remote into it to configure/tweak or update anything.For this post I will go over all the necessary steps to setup a Plex server. But for my usage & non-4K media, I could actually go back to a capable NAS with relatively few issues. If you have lots of 4K media & devices that can't play it natively, then you'd have use for a more powerful device. So most of the time it's just sitting there at idle, with the NiC & HDDs doing all the 'work' while I watch. Every device in my house (minus yesterday's attempt w/ an Xbox 360) will Direct Play, and we rarely use Remote Access that would need transcoding. Honestly I almost feel like the hardware is being wasted. It works pretty well, with movies taking a couple seconds to startup after making a selection, but the viewer experience is just fine on any competent hardware. Everything is still spinning HDDs, with media on an IronWolf NAS drive and the OS & transcoding folders on separate consumer HDDs. It's on an AMD Phenom II 1055T 6-core with 8GB of DDR3 RAM plus a GTX 1050 Ti for hardware transcoding. Basic install of Windows 10 w/ Plex Server running at startup. I only have Windows experience so that's what I'm using.

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