How to Build a Home Media Server Using TrueNAS and Plex

if you ever wanted to set up a home media server but you thought it was too expensive or too complicated well in this video we're going to show you it's neither expensive nor complicated but first what is a home media server in its simplest terms a home media server is a computer Appliance and software application that stores digital media like video audio and images and makes it available over your entire network and just about any computer device can be a home Media Server Like a laptop a Raspberry Pi a router and even a desktop computer as a matter of fact the computer directly behind me is a home media server and we have access to hundreds of movies and TV shows on our entire network so in this video we're going to show you how to transform a very old desktop computer into a sweet home media server and all you need is some extra storage drives that you probably have laying around or worst case scenario you can buy a couple hard drives online for a minimal price and for this video we bought two 4 TB hard drives from Western Digital and paid less than $170 not bad the software we're going to install today is tras scale and it's completely free and we also install Plex which is free as well so my basic rules for the minimum requirements for a home media server is a CPU with four cores and four threads a minimum of 8 GB of DDR3 RAM but 16 GB would be optimal and your motherboard should support USB 3.0 as well as SE 3.0 and you should have a dedicated GPU if possible nothing fancy you'll also want a DVD and Blu-ray burner to copy your DVDs and Blu-rays to your hard drives and lastly you should have a small SSD drive to store your OS 50 gigs to 120 gigs is plenty so in this video we're going to show you how to install the hard drives on this computer and how to install true Nas scale on this computer as well as Plex and we'll go through all the steps so don't worry so first things first let's go over the specs of our old desktop computer our motherboard is a sabertooth x79 with the LGA 2011 socket our CPU is the Intel i7 3930k at 3.2 GHz in R Rock and 32 gigs of sweet DDR3 RAM which is more than we're ever going to need but more RAM is more better our GPU is the GeForce GTX 1660ti and our power supply is the 850 W thermal take and last but not least we have an Asus Blu-ray and DVD burner to convert all of our DVDs and Blu-rays to digital format because I'm no pirate and if I was one I wouldn't tell you anyways our current Windows OS is on a 120 gig Samsung SSD and just it heads up when we install trest scale to the SSD it's going to reformat the entire SSD so bye-bye windows so if you have any important data on the SSD make sure to copy it somewhere else before installing trest scale so first things first let's install the hard drives oh and guys don't forget make sure to like share subscribe and comment it helps the algorithm thanks all right so we're set up with two SATA cables going into the motherboard and our two power connections that will power our hard drives there's one and we'll do exactly the same there and then we'll connect the power all right there the installation process for TR scale is smooth smooth and straightforward just like this coffee so first you want to download the true Nas scale ISO image then save it to your computer and then you want to download Bina etcher and then launch it and then click on flash from file and then click on the iso image then next you want to select Target which is the USB drive and then it's going to ask you to format the USB drive and go ahead and do that and then start the process and this takes about 5 to 10 minutes and then once you're done simply plug the USB into your soon Tob home media server and now you want to reboot your home media server and then go into the bio setting by pressing F2 keep pressing that until you get into the bio settings and once you're in the bio setting then go to boot priority then select the USB to be the boot drive and then next reboot the computer and from here tras will start the installation process and this installation process takes around 10 minutes so go ahead and select one for installation next you want to choose the hard drive to install the true Nas scale software and you want to install the software to the small SSD drive next go ahead and select one for admin user next change the password to whatever you want I recommend a strong password and go ahead and create the Swap and then next go ahead and reboot the computer once you get everything installed and reboot the system you're going to see this screen and take note at the very top of the network IP address you're going to use this IP address in any browser on your network the next you want to log in I have admin as my username and then type in my password and here's the dashboard so now we're going to take a look at the dashboard and take a look at all the menus and then we'll create a storage pool all right now that we're logged in we can see our true Nas scale dashboard and all the widgets and we have six here and uh we can reorder these if you want hit the reorder you can move them around and customize them it's pretty cool so just do as you will with that you can also configure you can uh add or subtract these if you'd like like that go back and add them super easy so the only complaint I would have about this dashboard is there's not enough of these widgets if you look over here to these tabs I feel that each tab should be a widget I don't know why they didn't do that U maybe in a software update they can add that but other than that this looks pretty good very functional so let's go to storage and create a pool first things first we're going to call it pool make it super simple and we hit next and because we only have two hard drives we're going to doing mirror if we have more drives we could set this up as raid Z1 or Raid Z2 but right now just going to do the mirror and hit next and we'll go through all these and just go next through all of these and uh create the pool confirm it's going to wipe these hard drives but there's nothing on the hard drives anyways and this should take about 30 seconds to create the pool it's pretty quick and there we go here is our storage dashboard with topology usage ZFS health and disk health and one thing also if you want to delete a pool go to export disconnect click on all these and then type in pool or whatever the name of your pool is and hit this button right here it will delete the pool we're not going to do that today but that's how you would do that all right the next thing we need to do is go to credentials and we're going to go to users we got to create a user so we can uh start using the nas so let's go to add and we're going to type in well the name in this YouTube channel sounds good to me that's what it is Ultimate techhub username is Uub I do like that pretty cool and we'll type in a really difficult password to put in and all right everything else looks good you can go down here and make any changes if you'd like just make sure here this is checked Samba authentication is checked and we're good there and we now have Uub as a user all right very good next thing we need to do is go to data sets we need to create a data set and here we go so add data set and we're going to add a what I call a directory that we'll be accessing and so it's pool is our path and then we need to add a name and we'll give it with the name utth ultimate Tech Hub and we can look down here everything is good everything is good except for generic go ahead and do SMB and you want to hit save all good there so now let's go to shares and we need to go to Windows SMB and we need to add the path so we're down here and here we go pool and me call it my data all right and that's the path we're going to be going to it's kind of the directory I guess you would call it is the directory utth save it and it enable the service absolutely first time we're doing this is now enabled woohoo all right so now we need one more step so let's go back let's go back to data sets and let's go back to permissions let's go to uth permissions and we'll go to edit and we're going to go in and add a user so add item and user we could do group owner group we're doing user and look for Uub Uub now down here you want to make the change to full control want full control so that's it right there so looks good save Access Control list give that a minute to process and we should be good to go all right let's check and make sure that we can get into our Network here so let's go down to network and we'll type in this our IP address of true scale and then directory it's going to ask for the username Uub and then password super complex password and we are in there we go all right now we're going to create two data sets within utth the first one's going to be movies and make sure it's SMB all right so let's go to add user which should be me and then Uub FL control and of course we'll add that then next we're going to do the Plex configuration all right we're good there so let's go added this there's the path so Plex config let's do config SMB save all right yes we want to go ahead and go to the ACL manager I like that a lot how that does that already pretty cool Uub we want full control there we go next thing you want to do is we need to put some media in here and like I said before I'm going to go ahead and put put these in movies fantastic now let's go back to the apps and we're going to install Plex so let's discover our apps you can see we've got a ton a ton of apps and here is Plex so let's go ah aad and click on that and click install it's very very simple now I've used Plex for five six years now and I love it um I had Plex on my other computer here um but this is going to be great to have this as a standalone home media server and I can dedicate my other PC just for the company for uh videos and stuff like that editing so all right now it's deploying it's going to take a little bit to run all right now we're going to go to storage and we're going to point to the path that we need to point to the movies okay and we'll do the same for the data volume and then configuration volume we're going to go to config on okay date so once again let me show you the Plex edit and you can take a look at it and kind of copy what I'm doing here once again you need to get your token when you go to w. plex.tv claim and here you would get your token you would copy it and you would put it right here all right and make sure the time zone is correct as well make sure all your media is pointing to the right folders as well as configuration if you have a GPU you can use that as well for transcoding I do have that and I might set that a bit later and also here is the port foring settings you want to put in your router so Plex server and use the external Port internal Port is the same same 32400 and you want to have the internal IP address as your true Naz IP address make sure it's TCP and save it to your port forwarding and that will allow you to port forward and you can access this um outside of your network and throughout your house all right we are now in Plex setup and we're not going to do this right now um here we go so this is a name server all right so we're going add library and movie type all right now we're going to add our movies so browse movie folder now I know it's under this right here and data and we'll add that add library and then next done so now I can access these movies anywhere in my home the Plex is set up and most TVs have Plex apps same with like laptops tablets and phones also I think our Roku box has a Plex app as well as the Apple box so we should be able to watch all these movies from anywhere in our home so that's it so now I got to add more movies to this so I'll go over here basically go in and let's uh just go to select all and we'll just bring it all over here now this is going to take a long time this is 124 gigs that will take a while and before you know it we're going to have a couple thousand movies on here it's going to take time so yeah that's it guys this is how you do it this is how you set up Plex true N scale you how to build your own home media server for free or for I guess less than $200 because if I just recycled some of these drives it would have been free but I did want to have some brand new drives in there and there were these are smaller these are like one terabyte maybe two terabytes so having a couple 4 terab drives that makes a big difference but yeah guys so if you have any questions please leave in the comments below I answer all the questions if you have any suggestions let me know as well and guys remember to like share subscribe comment and for God's sakes hit the Bell icon and I'll see you in the next video real soon what damn good high five peace