[Mashiro]

@tbelldesignco

Plex Pass is worth it mostly for hardware encoding and a few other features in my opinion. A bit expensive maybe given that you are the one hosting your own server and providing all needed resources and media. I wanted to buy the lifetime pass a few times already but always missed the bigger discount deals... even the last one where Plex was celebrating birthday and I could have gotten it for under 50 USD if using a VPN from a country with a currency that is very low in value (like Turkey or similar).

Meanwhile I run my own Plex server on a Synology DS218+ NAS with 2x 8 TB HDDs in RAID1. The CPU can according to Synology do 4K H265 encoding. So that should be easily enough for at least one 1080p encode or lower depending on source media. But even without the hardware encoding the software encoder works fine on H265 stuff. I swapped a lot of H264 material with H265 sources to save a lot of space that I invested into new media.

- 777 GB of Anime
- 2.27 TB of movies
- 2.82 TB of TV shows


@OldMeister

Hard work? You install the server application and register your server to you free Plex account. After that you create libraries that you point to folders with your media. That's it. Plex will download metadata such as covers, description, episode thumbnails, artist information and so on automatically from databases like TheMovieDatabase or TheTVDB.

The only hard work would be to have tidy, neat and nice media library where every TV show, movie and etc has proper titles and quality. That's about it and only if you care about having proper media libs.