The first service I installed on my home server was Plex. Back during the time of Blockbuster, we decided to purchase movies rather than rent them if there was a chance that we would want to watch them more than once. We ended up with over 400, and have long ago stored them in books and thrown out the cases but it was still a lot of trouble to dig through them and find what we wanted to watch. I wanted to rip the DVDs and eventually BluRays but didn't have the storage for them for a long time. I eventually got an external drive of sufficient size and started ripping movies. Eventually I found MakeMKV and purchased a license for it. I have been running Plex since 2020 and purchased a lifetime subscription in 2023, so it wasn't a new thing for me to have internally.
I had been running in on my desktop with an external drive. I have an Intel NUC that I tried hosting it on for a while, but it wasn't powerful enough to really do it justice. I often ran into reboot issues due to patching, or I would shut down my machine at the end of the day and have to go and start it back when someone wanted to watch a move.
Adding the Plex LXC service was super easy using the Proxmox VE Helper-Script to build and install the image. After adding it, I only needed to mount my external drive and start serving movies. I had set up 5 of my 6 2G drives as a RAID 0 and moved many of the movies there to increase . When I lost a drive in the array last week, I replaced 2 of them with very large drives (18G and 22G) and pulled all of my movies onto one of them. I repurposed the external drive as the large drive on one of my new cluster servers and have it mounted as a target for Proxmox Backup.
I don't have much more to say about running Plex locally, it doesn't require much maintenance. I added the service to Observium to monitor it and I update the base operating system and run the update of Plex itself through its interface. As I write this, I am now looking at scripts to automatically update the underlying images. ;-)
I do expose the UI in NextCloud, but we really only use it through our Rokus. I also picked up a FireStick last month when they were on deep discount at Target. I hadn't plugged it in until just now, and I haven't finished playing with it yet. Plex is honestly one of the easiest home applications I am currently running and if you have a CD, DVD, or BluRay collection at home there is no good reason to not take the plunge.
