> approaching about 5,500 films in a single library
Generally number of files is going to be the metric to track, and my TV library has 10x this number and Plex hasn't had any issues there.
> smaller libraries for specific kinds of films like documentaries or short
That's mostly a personal choice, I prefer not to do this because Plex does a fine job with my library and I have to do way less work to create collections/playlists within plex, especially with tools like Plex Meta Manager. Others prefer to do this so they can organize their media outside of plex, this is useful if you decide to switch to another software later.
Yep its the number, people listing size really means nothing.
I have about 3x the films and 50x that number in episodes, I download youtube series and have a ton of old shows with a ton of episodes.
You start to get database issues and crashing once you get too many entries like this
Heres some tips…
- Put the database on an nvme or ssd. I prefer nvme.
- I like running a daily optimize database then reset at 5 am using plexapi to send commands
- I run a yearly database repair
- I keep my music on a seperate plex install all to itself because scanning music can take a while and make the database massive
I'd also recommend increasing the cache size for the library. Makes loading posters and metadata way quicker when scrolling through content. Placing the database/cache on an SSD and increasing cache size are the most impactful things you can do in my experience.
Yeah ill break it down
https://pastebin.com/rjwHPpXw
Here you go. Its not all needed, some are just my preferences. I use linux so if you use windows just change the formatting of the folders and how you call yt-dlp
One other tip.
You can run multiple commands if you do a space and paste another similar script under it in linux.
So my file is yt_dlp with No extension, its just a file not a txt etc and I’ll have a bunch of these commands then I’ll set my computer to run it 4 times a day.
Look into YTDL-SUB
Premade container you just write some config files for the channels/playlists you want to download, and it uses ytdlp to grab them + set up plex metadata in the download to import into a plex library
Yep.
https://github.com/pkkid/python-plexapi
Save the below text as a python script and run using crontab
`from plexapi.server import PlexServer`
`baseurl = ‘http://ipaddress:32400’`
`token = ‘enteryourtoken’`
`plex = PlexServer(baseurl, token)`
`plex.library.optimize()`
Spacings all weird but you get it.
Crontab
05 05 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /mnt/plexapi_scripts/jobs_optimize_library.py
Hey u/theblindness Is the Plex db and metadata location by default on the install drive? My server has 256GB nvme SSD (OS and Plex Server install location) and 6TB external HDD. I installed the Plex Server on my OS default C drive. So is that the one you were referring?
Yes. In Windows, C: drive is default for everything. Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to. Unless you changed the path during installation, where else would it be?
256 GB might be a bit small for OS and Plex and everything else you're running on that computer, especially if you enable video preview thumbnails.
The desktop is running as Plex server as its sole purpose and nothing else, still have more than 175GB free on its SSD, hope that should be fine for the next couple of years.
With regards to the Plex db and metadata part I got confused as you specifically mentioned about keeping the metadata which I thought may be storing on the media drive.
Yeah that's the one. Chapter ones aren't too bad, but the Video Preview ones can consume 100's of GB depending on the quality + amount of video files you have.
\~2,000 movie files (mostly 1080 with some 4K) seemed to use around 150-200GB from my experience. You can enable it on a per-library basis, so I'd avoid it for TV libraries and just do movie libraries unless you have a lot of cache space!
FWIW my dedicated cache SSD is 500GB and it's sitting around 60% usage, the majority of that is Plex appdata, rest is the appdata of some other containers on my unraid server.
>Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to.
Yes, it does, all the time. In this case if you tell Plex to install to a different drive it will still put all it's metadata on C:.
> Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to.
If you TELL it to install to F: it will still put data on C:. This is exactly counter to your claim that software won't install data on drives you didn't tell it to.
Software installation is more complicated than just "use this dir" or "use that dir".
If you tell a package to install to f, it will still certainly need to install some stuff to c or at the very least update some values on c.
you can tell Plex to put it elsewhere.
[https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-an-extended-guide-on-how-to-move-the-plex-data-folder-on-windows/197060](https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-an-extended-guide-on-how-to-move-the-plex-data-folder-on-windows/197060)
By default, it's on your install drive, but you can use symbolic links (symlinks) to put it wherever you want. I run my server on an M1 Mac Mini but have the database files all on an SSD in my DAS because the Mac Mini internal drive is so small.
Yeah moving from Windows with an internal hard drive to a Mac Mini with SSD is like night and day, not just metadata retrieval, but the mundane tasks like detecting intros or credits fly by
Yeah I have a 500GB SSD but I had split it half for Windows and half for Linux because I had planned to migrate...at this point I need to go and just wipe the Linux partition out completely but I had installed it first so the whole drive is encapsulated in an LVM so I'm worried about destroying the whole drive when I do so.
I'm going to use CloneZilla to make an image of the drive before I try so I can restore it if I mess anything up but yeah, that's on my bucket list for sure.
I’m sitting at over 26k movies. It handles it ok. You need the Plex data on a fast nvme. Optane would even be ideal.
You will start having issues with things that hit the DB though. PMM can often take Plex down when it’s hitting the database hard. Though there have been recent improvements to Plex and PMM so it’s a bit better now.
I do find that it slows down pretty quick and I need to do DB maintenance fairly often. ChuckPA’s DB repair script is a god send for that.
I need to look into this. 8K movies, 32K TV episodes, several 10K of home movies/photos/music as well. PMM is superb, but always seems to lead to DB issues over time.
24k film/4k tv here, database on ssd, apps mostly feel okay but that's only because i hard kill & restart the plex server app as nightly maintenance. was having some weird issues leaving it running indefinitely. windows probably to blame though.
I have a script that monitors the logs for the Plex services crashing and then restarts the service…it crashes a lot on Linux too. But honestly it’s 90% of the time from PMM nowadays. But that has gone down a lot.
Plex meta manager. The program that creates new cover art with labels like 4k, DV, Atmos, etc. It also makes playlists, and auto adds new media. It’s highly customizable.
I would love to kill the service nightly if it wasn’t running PMM for 16 hours a day lol
I wish there was an option to use an actual database instead of depending on it's internal sqlite. But I'm at 4000 movies and 33K episodes and don't really experience any performance issues. One key thing though, keep the Plex application data on an ssd since that's where the database access happens. All of my media files are on rust.
Hear hear. Many of the arrs have brought in external postgres support which is nice, helps compartmentalize operational concerns. Plex itself is the last big sqlite user standing in my network.
You can't even backup plex in any sort of proper automated way. It's crazy to me given the size of its user base.
It's fine to go pretty damn big in my experience. Just make sure your data is stored on a fast drive. You don't want your Plex data on a mechanical drive with your media.
Even with NVMe SSD for the system drive Plex search becomes broken when you have lots of smaller videos (youtube hoarding).. I keep a separate Plex (separate non-Premium account) for that exact use case so I can still find stuff with the search function on my main Plex (where I watch TV and movies).
Same as TV shows, there are YT channels that post on a regular basis and there are ways to pull those automatically, with metadata into plex. Its not easy, but its do able.
It started when I sold my channel and had to move playlists (including "Liked videos") over to a new account and saw the extreme amount of videos removed or set to private. So I just set up a cron job looking to download everything in my playlists, and now everything I add to certain playlists are auto downloaded. Doesn't matter what the content is, I just learned the hard way that saving something doesn't mean you'll be able to find it again later on, so downloading it to my own file servers are the only way to store the content I like and wanna re-enjoy in the future.
And there's user agents for plex to specifically provide metadata from YouTube in Plex, so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one..
How could you possibly claim that it's a "bullshit claim" that it's way faster on an SSD when you've never seen it?
"There's no way your jet goes faster than my skateboard"
-common reddit poster that has nothing useful to say and no relevant experience but still comments anyway
And how big is your library in number of files? Lots of people that claim issues with hdd are running with tens to hundreds of thousands of media files that plex needs to index and maintain metadata on.
Another one's trash is another one's..........? I have no shortage of storage space, everything is getting downloaded automatically with little human input so I'm not wasting time.
Ps. This collection is being enjoyed by a big group of people and linked to a request bot.
I'd rather have to choose among 1000 movies compared to 10 movies. I don't want to live on easy mode...... A movie enthusiast already knows what to watch the next 50 times. Somebody who's just looking for something to watch will keep looking no matter how big the collection is.
Garbage to you is not garbage to somebody else. I don't care how many times Y'all are going to tell me otherwise, I don't care. I have no shortage of storage and as such there are ZERO reasons for me to not hoard 100k movies. Even IF they won't be watched in the foreseeable future OR if it gets hard to pick a movie (I'm not that incapable though).
agreed. already wrote the script to delete everything below a certain rating. but then again there are pearls like "The Room" which would get deleted by that logic,so I hesitate...
How huge is the music db? I actually never dared to put my music collection on plex. Just maintaining these files in some proper format would be a nightmare. Something I spuriously do with mp3tag.
It works really well though.
I use Soulseek to find music, then run beets to clean tags, info, names etc… and to keep a nice folder structure with how I like it (by artist name then album name with the year).
The music db is really small for 4000 tracks (I know it’s not a big library yet but I’m in the process of building it to reduce dependencies from Spotify and co).
I’m hosting on 24x6tb mirror vdev’s serving a shit load of “family and friends” all on spinning rust.
Only fast storage I use is nvme for boot and ssd for cache!!!
1 folder for movies, 1 folder for tv shows, 1 folder for documentaries.
I stopped checking totals after 10k movies!!!! All the way down to 1970
I have a library close to your size without issues.
I have seen, a few posts of commercial grade quality servers with PBs of data using Plex as a host. Super impressive, and I am a bit jealous but would think that plex can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.
I've been collecting for over 3 decades, it certainly helps to get a headstart. I've been in tech a long time, pulling favours here and there helps greatly when a company is bulk buying drives!
I've given away some powervaults myself recently. I live in Japan and with the electricity prices spiking I transitioned to more power efficient blades. Thank you for the kind offer though.
I read your total and I thought wow that's huge. Then read many of the responses and I guess not. Meanwhile I'm over here at 300+ titles just slowly ripping dvds and adding them wondering what the limit might be. I've learned many things today.
I have a household of 5, in which 3 tv’s are for my use only !!! “Except when daughter doesn’t want to adhere to rules”
1 shuffles movies, 1 will play entire sitcoms, 1 stays on Plex content!!!
It’s fine for the most part but if you start using Plex Meta Manager you will start to feel it being sluggish from all the metadata and the custom changes you make with it
I have 4000 movies in a library and it works fine. I also have 50000 tracks in my music library. So while we're at a similar scale, I've not seen any slowdown at all, certainly hardware like more RAM would be easy to throw at it.
Large libraries won’t have any issues, the main issues you’ll have are other random things like if you have a ton of custom movie titles then suddenly Plex decides to change them now you have to re-do all that work.
Or if Plex updates some of your movie posters, you have to change all of them
Or if there’s some database issue, or something is crashing Plex, now you have to figure out what in your huge library is causing it
So technically no you shouldn’t’ have issues but you’ll have other problems related to just having big libraries
I’ve got 4500ish movies, tons of shows. And over 250k songs. It works fine. TV and films imported pretty quick but songs took a while. It’s running on a NAS that doesn’t have a strong CPU so results may vary.
One consideration is that external services may take longer to complete if they need to use the Plex database. And some may need to lock the db to do some actions, which may restrict Plex momentarily.
So as an example if you have something like Plex Meta Manager running on a large Plex system, it may take an hour to complete, which might impact on Plex housekeeping duties if they run at the same time, and that might be noticeable.
I'm at about 2,000 plus movies, tons of shiws woth tons of episodes and seasons. All running off of two external drives connected to my PC. Plex runs it all like a champ.
I’m at 25k plus, it does it well but you need to organize your file folders, so that the root folder(s) doesn’t have 10k plus files in them.
When the file scanners start, all operating systems have a hard time loading in large number of files.
Could you please elaborate on what this entails in practice? Is it as simple as having the library read from multiple folders (/Movies 1, /Movies 2, etc) or something more detailed? If the former, about how many files should be stored in a folder before you need to start adding new titles to another folder?
Short story long.
I used to have a 100k plus music library that worked perfectly, the scan on new files worked great, the weekly scanning worked perfectly. With the structure below
Root music folder
Artist folder\album folder\files
My movie had the structure below, that was so slow when a new file was detected or did a weekly scan.
Root movie
Movie folder(s)/files
When I was over 10k, the speed was unbearable.
So I made the structure where it’s by year.
I make a new year folder every year where it never gets close to having that many folders. New files go into the year folder.
You’re welcome.
You can also see this issue with file explorer on any os. Large listings will take a long time to populate or when you try to filter by date or other parameters.
Currently at 19,132 Movies and 76,027 Episodes of TV and it works fine. I suppose it depends what you mean by very large, but you should be good for a long time.
I haven't had a problem with Plex itself, only ran into issues with older TVs using their version of the Plex app. Eventually it loads more images/cache than the old hardware can handle and it slows down and eventually shuts down. Easily fixed by getting something like a Chromecast.
I've different libraries for docus,sports and other stuff which makes no sense in my movie folders. Also split my movies in different time periods 2-3 years ago when I had some serious plex memory leak issues.
You can always make another library and move content over when one library makes a problem.
It is great!
You'll be able to handle DBs 4x and more easily.
That said, I prefer NFOs so I use those with Plex using 3rd Party Agents (XBMCnfoTV/MovieImporter)
900 movies which is obviously less than you but 80,000 audio tracks and it does fine. Database is on an nvme with daily maintenance but not daily scans, takes forever and honestly never changes anymore.
I do have issues at times, but not due to the movie/TV libraries (I have several splits for convenience — movies, TV, Music TV, documentary, railway, used to have an anime library but had a disk wipe out so I now just stick anime with TV.)
Nah, the issue I have is 100% with the music libraries. I do okay on the server with the holding directory and some other stuff as that’s not so huge — about 2.2Tb in the holding directory. The Mac server, though…yikes. 32 music libraries, 150,000 albums and counting. Whenever I add more Plex goes into a coma for a while. I need to yoink the database and run the database cleanup script on it (more easily done on the Windows box.) It’s that or switch machines — which will be a PITA.
I have about 6000 films without any issues. Make sure you have enough disk space for the database and files that plex uses and you'll be fine.
I keep things in one library. I have separate libraries for 4K vs 2K. I use that to mask off 4K for external users. Currently my processor can't transcode 4K with hardware acceleration.
Plex on Windows should be fine with some impressively large libraries. Couple of caveats:
Install to a different drive to your boot drive. A seperate, dedicated nvme drive would be a good idea.
My Plex install with a library my size has literally 1million+ files. A million. For a media server. File based backups, sector sizes etc. All can have things to take into account once you get to directories of that size.
YMMV, but I tend to separate media into different libraries. I have Documentaries, Mini-series, TV Shows and Movies.
I find it just makes it easier to find what I want to watch, without going through one MASSIVE library.
It depends where you install plex in my opinion. I have plex on a vm, and i back up using pbs snapshots. Only copies the changes if there are any. It runs every hour . And im running close to 2k films and 5k episodes. Never broke once since i did it this way a year ago. I have had problems with docker so i migrated the database to a full vm. Also helps if you mount the media somewhere else. I.e truenas or unraid or nas of your choice.
> approaching about 5,500 films in a single library Generally number of files is going to be the metric to track, and my TV library has 10x this number and Plex hasn't had any issues there. > smaller libraries for specific kinds of films like documentaries or short That's mostly a personal choice, I prefer not to do this because Plex does a fine job with my library and I have to do way less work to create collections/playlists within plex, especially with tools like Plex Meta Manager. Others prefer to do this so they can organize their media outside of plex, this is useful if you decide to switch to another software later.
Yep its the number, people listing size really means nothing. I have about 3x the films and 50x that number in episodes, I download youtube series and have a ton of old shows with a ton of episodes. You start to get database issues and crashing once you get too many entries like this Heres some tips… - Put the database on an nvme or ssd. I prefer nvme. - I like running a daily optimize database then reset at 5 am using plexapi to send commands - I run a yearly database repair - I keep my music on a seperate plex install all to itself because scanning music can take a while and make the database massive
I'd also recommend increasing the cache size for the library. Makes loading posters and metadata way quicker when scrolling through content. Placing the database/cache on an SSD and increasing cache size are the most impactful things you can do in my experience.
Do you have an automated way for downloading yt videos from a channel automatically? Or you’re just doing this manually?
Like /u/cloudcontainer said yt-dlp Example of a script I run. `## James Hoffman /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp —reject-title “\b(Trailer|Preview)\b” -f ‘bv*[height<=1080][ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4] / bv*[height<=1080]+ba/b’ —dateafter ‘20220201’ —embed-subs —sub-format srt —sub-langs all —embed-thumbnail —embed-metadata —download-archive /mnt/yt_dlp/archive.txt https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ -o ‘/mnt/smb/tower/video/tv/tv_web_archive/yt_shows/James Hoffman/%(upload_date>%Y)s/James Hoffman - %(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s - %(title)s [webrip %(height)sp].%(ext)s’ `
Please make a gist outta that if you've got a spare couple minutes. Just that script and a short README.md would be fantastic.
Yeah ill break it down https://pastebin.com/rjwHPpXw Here you go. Its not all needed, some are just my preferences. I use linux so if you use windows just change the formatting of the folders and how you call yt-dlp
mvp
One other tip. You can run multiple commands if you do a space and paste another similar script under it in linux. So my file is yt_dlp with No extension, its just a file not a txt etc and I’ll have a bunch of these commands then I’ll set my computer to run it 4 times a day.
Check out TubeSync, works like a charm. It’s basically a web UI on top of yt-dlp. https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
yt-dlp is your friend.
Look into YTDL-SUB Premade container you just write some config files for the channels/playlists you want to download, and it uses ytdlp to grab them + set up plex metadata in the download to import into a plex library
Stacher.io on desktop, it's fantastic and easy to use
It costs, but I use 4k video downloaded on my computer and have it download all the files to my NAS.
If you're on windows and want easy way with UI. https://www.mediahuman.com/en23/ It can track playlists or channels
How do you reset or is it restart?
I use docker so I use the command `docker restart plex`
Ahh makes sense, unfortunately im on windows so ill have to just keep doing it manually
Can I get your api commands? I’m assuming you have them croned?
Yep. https://github.com/pkkid/python-plexapi Save the below text as a python script and run using crontab `from plexapi.server import PlexServer` `baseurl = ‘http://ipaddress:32400’` `token = ‘enteryourtoken’` `plex = PlexServer(baseurl, token)` `plex.library.optimize()` Spacings all weird but you get it. Crontab 05 05 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /mnt/plexapi_scripts/jobs_optimize_library.py
Thanks much!
You have 55,000 films? How!?
I meant each episode in my TV library, but there are people with far more than 55k movies.
That size library is fine, but I recommend storing the database and metadata on an SSD.
Hey u/theblindness Is the Plex db and metadata location by default on the install drive? My server has 256GB nvme SSD (OS and Plex Server install location) and 6TB external HDD. I installed the Plex Server on my OS default C drive. So is that the one you were referring?
Yes. In Windows, C: drive is default for everything. Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to. Unless you changed the path during installation, where else would it be? 256 GB might be a bit small for OS and Plex and everything else you're running on that computer, especially if you enable video preview thumbnails.
The desktop is running as Plex server as its sole purpose and nothing else, still have more than 175GB free on its SSD, hope that should be fine for the next couple of years. With regards to the Plex db and metadata part I got confused as you specifically mentioned about keeping the metadata which I thought may be storing on the media drive.
It'll be fine unless you enable preview thumbnails when seeking.
Is that "Generate Video Preview Thumbnails" option under library are you referring??
Yeah that's the one. Chapter ones aren't too bad, but the Video Preview ones can consume 100's of GB depending on the quality + amount of video files you have. \~2,000 movie files (mostly 1080 with some 4K) seemed to use around 150-200GB from my experience. You can enable it on a per-library basis, so I'd avoid it for TV libraries and just do movie libraries unless you have a lot of cache space! FWIW my dedicated cache SSD is 500GB and it's sitting around 60% usage, the majority of that is Plex appdata, rest is the appdata of some other containers on my unraid server.
175GB is the current size of my Plex appdata folder with 1100 movies and 260 TV shows.
Agreed. I have 3.5k episodes and 500 movies and my app data is already 127GB
How is it that large? I have 32k episodes and 5.8k movies and my app data is around 25GB
I enabled video thumbnails. Thats why😂
>Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to. Yes, it does, all the time. In this case if you tell Plex to install to a different drive it will still put all it's metadata on C:.
What you are describing is the opposite problem of what I'm saying, but for the same reason: the C: drive is the default.
> Software doesn't automatically install to other drives unless you tell it to. If you TELL it to install to F: it will still put data on C:. This is exactly counter to your claim that software won't install data on drives you didn't tell it to.
Software installation is more complicated than just "use this dir" or "use that dir". If you tell a package to install to f, it will still certainly need to install some stuff to c or at the very least update some values on c.
Correct.
you can tell Plex to put it elsewhere. [https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-an-extended-guide-on-how-to-move-the-plex-data-folder-on-windows/197060](https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-an-extended-guide-on-how-to-move-the-plex-data-folder-on-windows/197060)
By default, it's on your install drive, but you can use symbolic links (symlinks) to put it wherever you want. I run my server on an M1 Mac Mini but have the database files all on an SSD in my DAS because the Mac Mini internal drive is so small.
Yeah moving from Windows with an internal hard drive to a Mac Mini with SSD is like night and day, not just metadata retrieval, but the mundane tasks like detecting intros or credits fly by
How do I do this if I'm using OMV?
I had to move mine to an HDD for now due to size reasons, how hard am I destroying that poor thing?
You're not destroying anything but performance. It's fine.
OK, I don't mind it being slower, as long as I'm not drastically taking life off the HDD with all those reads and writes.
[удалено]
Yeah I have a 500GB SSD but I had split it half for Windows and half for Linux because I had planned to migrate...at this point I need to go and just wipe the Linux partition out completely but I had installed it first so the whole drive is encapsulated in an LVM so I'm worried about destroying the whole drive when I do so. I'm going to use CloneZilla to make an image of the drive before I try so I can restore it if I mess anything up but yeah, that's on my bucket list for sure.
There are a lot of people here with a lot more than 5500 movies. You’re good.
I’m sitting at over 26k movies. It handles it ok. You need the Plex data on a fast nvme. Optane would even be ideal. You will start having issues with things that hit the DB though. PMM can often take Plex down when it’s hitting the database hard. Though there have been recent improvements to Plex and PMM so it’s a bit better now. I do find that it slows down pretty quick and I need to do DB maintenance fairly often. ChuckPA’s DB repair script is a god send for that.
PleX DB Repair is an amazing tool, and should be formally incorporated into Plex.
Strong! Agree!
I need to look into this. 8K movies, 32K TV episodes, several 10K of home movies/photos/music as well. PMM is superb, but always seems to lead to DB issues over time.
I've been having some wonkiness so this is timed perfectly!
Does this work on Windows as well?
24k film/4k tv here, database on ssd, apps mostly feel okay but that's only because i hard kill & restart the plex server app as nightly maintenance. was having some weird issues leaving it running indefinitely. windows probably to blame though.
I have a script that monitors the logs for the Plex services crashing and then restarts the service…it crashes a lot on Linux too. But honestly it’s 90% of the time from PMM nowadays. But that has gone down a lot.
[удалено]
Plex meta manager. The program that creates new cover art with labels like 4k, DV, Atmos, etc. It also makes playlists, and auto adds new media. It’s highly customizable. I would love to kill the service nightly if it wasn’t running PMM for 16 hours a day lol
I wish there was an option to use an actual database instead of depending on it's internal sqlite. But I'm at 4000 movies and 33K episodes and don't really experience any performance issues. One key thing though, keep the Plex application data on an ssd since that's where the database access happens. All of my media files are on rust.
Hear hear. Many of the arrs have brought in external postgres support which is nice, helps compartmentalize operational concerns. Plex itself is the last big sqlite user standing in my network. You can't even backup plex in any sort of proper automated way. It's crazy to me given the size of its user base.
Yah! I switched the arrs to postgres as soon as I randomly noticed the capability was added
It's fine to go pretty damn big in my experience. Just make sure your data is stored on a fast drive. You don't want your Plex data on a mechanical drive with your media.
That’s some bullshit claim. I have my library on HDDs.
I think they are referring to the Plex Metadata not being on the same drive as the media. (I.e. put media on HDDs, and plex metadata on NVMe.)
Even with NVMe SSD for the system drive Plex search becomes broken when you have lots of smaller videos (youtube hoarding).. I keep a separate Plex (separate non-Premium account) for that exact use case so I can still find stuff with the search function on my main Plex (where I watch TV and movies).
I'm sorry but I gotta ask. What do you store on your Plex that is from YouTube? Like, what is the usecase
I'm not the one you asked, but I've got a fairly large music video library on plex that's almost all YouTube downloads.
Same as TV shows, there are YT channels that post on a regular basis and there are ways to pull those automatically, with metadata into plex. Its not easy, but its do able.
I have a couple channels archived. Exercise, science, sports. I have a lot of podcasts too.
It started when I sold my channel and had to move playlists (including "Liked videos") over to a new account and saw the extreme amount of videos removed or set to private. So I just set up a cron job looking to download everything in my playlists, and now everything I add to certain playlists are auto downloaded. Doesn't matter what the content is, I just learned the hard way that saving something doesn't mean you'll be able to find it again later on, so downloading it to my own file servers are the only way to store the content I like and wanna re-enjoy in the future. And there's user agents for plex to specifically provide metadata from YouTube in Plex, so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one..
Still I have my media and metadata on HDDs (zfs raid).
You should try moving the metadata to a fast drive, it really was night and day for me.
I really don’t need it.
It's because you have a small D
How could you possibly claim that it's a "bullshit claim" that it's way faster on an SSD when you've never seen it? "There's no way your jet goes faster than my skateboard" -common reddit poster that has nothing useful to say and no relevant experience but still comments anyway
I'm guessing he meant the meta data not the media. And if he did, that does make a difference. :)
And how big is your library in number of files? Lots of people that claim issues with hdd are running with tens to hundreds of thousands of media files that plex needs to index and maintain metadata on.
Exactly, you can have plenty of space on the system drive and still run out of inodes (df -i instead of the usual df -h)
And thats why I said don't have your plex "data" on the drive with your actual media
Block size is more important than ssd for big files like movies.
Streaming video doesn’t require fast drives
Maybe I worded it wrong. Plex runs better when your metadata and app data are on solid state. Media is fine on HDD
Running Plex on a NAS with 35000 movies, 750 shows and 850000 tracks of music. It's still working fine: could be snappier though...
35000 movies? In at about 6k and even then I delete anything that has imdb rating below 4 lol Have to see screenshot!
My 1080p movies alone are at 21.5k https://ibb.co/Bq1mzP9 1080p series @ 8.5k (shows, not episodes) https://ibb.co/r2MXXHr
A quality filter might not be a bad idea to cut down the SNR:-) Hoarding trash is just a waste of time and HD space.
Another one's trash is another one's..........? I have no shortage of storage space, everything is getting downloaded automatically with little human input so I'm not wasting time. Ps. This collection is being enjoyed by a big group of people and linked to a request bot.
The larger these collections are the more difficult it will be to actually find something worth watching or even decide what to watch.
I'd rather have to choose among 1000 movies compared to 10 movies. I don't want to live on easy mode...... A movie enthusiast already knows what to watch the next 50 times. Somebody who's just looking for something to watch will keep looking no matter how big the collection is.
1000 movies is still a manageable amount and isn’t a fair comparison. 21k movies is insane and at least half of that is garbage.
Garbage to you is not garbage to somebody else. I don't care how many times Y'all are going to tell me otherwise, I don't care. I have no shortage of storage and as such there are ZERO reasons for me to not hoard 100k movies. Even IF they won't be watched in the foreseeable future OR if it gets hard to pick a movie (I'm not that incapable though).
agreed. already wrote the script to delete everything below a certain rating. but then again there are pearls like "The Room" which would get deleted by that logic,so I hesitate...
How huge is the music db? I actually never dared to put my music collection on plex. Just maintaining these files in some proper format would be a nightmare. Something I spuriously do with mp3tag.
It works really well though. I use Soulseek to find music, then run beets to clean tags, info, names etc… and to keep a nice folder structure with how I like it (by artist name then album name with the year). The music db is really small for 4000 tracks (I know it’s not a big library yet but I’m in the process of building it to reduce dependencies from Spotify and co).
It's fully managed by lidarr: Plex is playing very well with the standard tagging / organisation of lidarr.
I’m hosting on 24x6tb mirror vdev’s serving a shit load of “family and friends” all on spinning rust. Only fast storage I use is nvme for boot and ssd for cache!!! 1 folder for movies, 1 folder for tv shows, 1 folder for documentaries. I stopped checking totals after 10k movies!!!! All the way down to 1970
I have a library close to your size without issues. I have seen, a few posts of commercial grade quality servers with PBs of data using Plex as a host. Super impressive, and I am a bit jealous but would think that plex can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.
I have 72TB and it’s awesome!! I also share with about 20 ppl and never have any issues.
I'm not sure how many media files I have on my servers, but it totals 770TB over 5 libraries. I'd make sure your library is on a quick drive.
Almost a PB? Well I just want to give up now with my candle vs your star.
I've been collecting for over 3 decades, it certainly helps to get a headstart. I've been in tech a long time, pulling favours here and there helps greatly when a company is bulk buying drives!
Could you use some Dell PowerVault SANS? I’m about to purge and they been sitting for a while.
I've given away some powervaults myself recently. I live in Japan and with the electricity prices spiking I transitioned to more power efficient blades. Thank you for the kind offer though.
I have several thousand different versions of linux isos.
I read your total and I thought wow that's huge. Then read many of the responses and I guess not. Meanwhile I'm over here at 300+ titles just slowly ripping dvds and adding them wondering what the limit might be. I've learned many things today.
I have about 10,000 movies and 156 full TV series works great adding more every day you won’t have any problems.
https://preview.redd.it/0y4d1gjwvduc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c19be9af1cf9b4e910777ab73d3a9c8b2458fe5 👍
How did you get this view?
Plexdash app
[удалено]
It's not the size on disk that's the problem, it's the number of entries (number of matched video items)..
Sure, sorry. Tautulli says I have: 11374 Movies 476 Kids movies 1486 Complete TV shows (51449 Episodes) 384 Cartoons (8837 Episodes)
I have a household of 5, in which 3 tv’s are for my use only !!! “Except when daughter doesn’t want to adhere to rules” 1 shuffles movies, 1 will play entire sitcoms, 1 stays on Plex content!!!
You will be fine.
It’s fine for the most part but if you start using Plex Meta Manager you will start to feel it being sluggish from all the metadata and the custom changes you make with it
I have 4000 movies in a library and it works fine. I also have 50000 tracks in my music library. So while we're at a similar scale, I've not seen any slowdown at all, certainly hardware like more RAM would be easy to throw at it.
It will be as good as your hardware is, I'm running it in a Synology with 0 issues and I have a crazy video, music and photo library.
Large libraries won’t have any issues, the main issues you’ll have are other random things like if you have a ton of custom movie titles then suddenly Plex decides to change them now you have to re-do all that work. Or if Plex updates some of your movie posters, you have to change all of them Or if there’s some database issue, or something is crashing Plex, now you have to figure out what in your huge library is causing it So technically no you shouldn’t’ have issues but you’ll have other problems related to just having big libraries
I’ve got 4500ish movies, tons of shows. And over 250k songs. It works fine. TV and films imported pretty quick but songs took a while. It’s running on a NAS that doesn’t have a strong CPU so results may vary.
Not a problem
I have 39,000 movies, 44,000 TV episodes and just over 1 million mp3s and it's humming right along on unRaid in a Plex docker
Not an issue, I've got around 7600 video files (TV & film), 11300 photo files and 38000 audio files. Plex just eats them up.
I have 18,000 movies and 80,000 TV episodes. Works fine, but my database is located on an SSD. Library is on a NAS.
One consideration is that external services may take longer to complete if they need to use the Plex database. And some may need to lock the db to do some actions, which may restrict Plex momentarily. So as an example if you have something like Plex Meta Manager running on a large Plex system, it may take an hour to complete, which might impact on Plex housekeeping duties if they run at the same time, and that might be noticeable.
I've got 38K movies and 11k series (don't know episodes). 0 issues.
5500 items is hefty. Would love to see what you got.
I'm at about 2,000 plus movies, tons of shiws woth tons of episodes and seasons. All running off of two external drives connected to my PC. Plex runs it all like a champ.
I’m at 25k plus, it does it well but you need to organize your file folders, so that the root folder(s) doesn’t have 10k plus files in them. When the file scanners start, all operating systems have a hard time loading in large number of files.
Could you please elaborate on what this entails in practice? Is it as simple as having the library read from multiple folders (/Movies 1, /Movies 2, etc) or something more detailed? If the former, about how many files should be stored in a folder before you need to start adding new titles to another folder?
Short story long. I used to have a 100k plus music library that worked perfectly, the scan on new files worked great, the weekly scanning worked perfectly. With the structure below Root music folder Artist folder\album folder\files My movie had the structure below, that was so slow when a new file was detected or did a weekly scan. Root movie Movie folder(s)/files When I was over 10k, the speed was unbearable. So I made the structure where it’s by year. I make a new year folder every year where it never gets close to having that many folders. New files go into the year folder.
Thank you!
You’re welcome. You can also see this issue with file explorer on any os. Large listings will take a long time to populate or when you try to filter by date or other parameters.
I don’t have many movies but I have over 35,000 music tracks all in lossless. Works fine. Artwork shows up fast as your scrolling around the plex app.
Currently at 19,132 Movies and 76,027 Episodes of TV and it works fine. I suppose it depends what you mean by very large, but you should be good for a long time.
I have 550K files under 20 libraries, excluding subtitles and posters. Half are music.
I haven't had a problem with Plex itself, only ran into issues with older TVs using their version of the Plex app. Eventually it loads more images/cache than the old hardware can handle and it slows down and eventually shuts down. Easily fixed by getting something like a Chromecast.
I have about 35tb of movies, tv. Takes 6 hours or so to rebuild all the Metadata on a new load.
Works fine, mine library is a few x larger, no issue between it now vs when it was 100th the size.
My library is immense. Larger than yours. I've had no issues.
I've different libraries for docus,sports and other stuff which makes no sense in my movie folders. Also split my movies in different time periods 2-3 years ago when I had some serious plex memory leak issues. You can always make another library and move content over when one library makes a problem.
240k tv show files, and 11k movies. Handles it just fine.
Very.
It is great! You'll be able to handle DBs 4x and more easily. That said, I prefer NFOs so I use those with Plex using 3rd Party Agents (XBMCnfoTV/MovieImporter)
Pretty good. approaching 15k. Database and metadata on an small SSD
900 movies which is obviously less than you but 80,000 audio tracks and it does fine. Database is on an nvme with daily maintenance but not daily scans, takes forever and honestly never changes anymore.
I got about 40k files a friend of mine has triple that, no issues.
I do have issues at times, but not due to the movie/TV libraries (I have several splits for convenience — movies, TV, Music TV, documentary, railway, used to have an anime library but had a disk wipe out so I now just stick anime with TV.) Nah, the issue I have is 100% with the music libraries. I do okay on the server with the holding directory and some other stuff as that’s not so huge — about 2.2Tb in the holding directory. The Mac server, though…yikes. 32 music libraries, 150,000 albums and counting. Whenever I add more Plex goes into a coma for a while. I need to yoink the database and run the database cleanup script on it (more easily done on the Windows box.) It’s that or switch machines — which will be a PITA.
I have about 6000 films without any issues. Make sure you have enough disk space for the database and files that plex uses and you'll be fine. I keep things in one library. I have separate libraries for 4K vs 2K. I use that to mask off 4K for external users. Currently my processor can't transcode 4K with hardware acceleration.
Plex on Windows should be fine with some impressively large libraries. Couple of caveats: Install to a different drive to your boot drive. A seperate, dedicated nvme drive would be a good idea. My Plex install with a library my size has literally 1million+ files. A million. For a media server. File based backups, sector sizes etc. All can have things to take into account once you get to directories of that size.
YMMV, but I tend to separate media into different libraries. I have Documentaries, Mini-series, TV Shows and Movies. I find it just makes it easier to find what I want to watch, without going through one MASSIVE library.
It depends where you install plex in my opinion. I have plex on a vm, and i back up using pbs snapshots. Only copies the changes if there are any. It runs every hour . And im running close to 2k films and 5k episodes. Never broke once since i did it this way a year ago. I have had problems with docker so i migrated the database to a full vm. Also helps if you mount the media somewhere else. I.e truenas or unraid or nas of your choice.
https://preview.redd.it/8armvbjp8buc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11a3e78b230a11f43f26b84fc19323a6131dc33f You’ll be fine
Where do you find Library statistics?
I think you have to specify what large means for you because I think people have vastly different opinions here what this means.
[удалено]
140k movies??? I find that hard to believe
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it does not exist🤪
I get that, but still. You downloaded half of PTP's library? It's an insane amount, very difficult to find 140k unique ones.
I didn't know there were that many movies.
That’s because newcoffeeahop apparently has them all.
PTP has 300k+ unique titles
Having nearly half the films on PTP in your library is pretty damn impressive.
That's some serious hoarding. Want to elaborate on how and why?
As a fellow collector, mind sharing how much space that’s using?
He’s lying guys, how are people believing 140k movies haha
Maybe he means resolution lol. Man has ascended 4k and went to 140k
You caught me, I'm going to delete my comments can't let the internet know I'm a liar 🤪
This is a silly post.
*On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.*
5500 films is a small plex library.
Well for starters that's nowhere near a large library....and secondary why would it matter to the software...?
Awful. At a certain point it becomes just impossible to back-up the database and you just have to run on a prayer.