How to join a Plex server

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This guide is intended for friends that I invite to join my Plex server but might also be useful to other people.

What is Plex?

Plex is a streaming service that allows you to to self-host and share your own media (video, audio and photos) with support for fetching metadata for movies, shows and songs. Plex provides multiple ways of accessing content, such as a web client and apps for many devices.

What does it cost?

TL;DR: The web client and basic features are free, apps can be unlocked for a one time payment (~5€) each and additional features require a subscription.

The basic functionality of Plex is completely free, which includes playback of anything on your server, as well as podcasts, news, and web shows. Plex mobile apps require being unlocked (through an in-app purchase or a Plex Pass subscription), and premium features are restricted to those with an active Plex Pass subscription.

More details can be found here.

So how do I join?

Create a Plex account

Go to plex.tv and click “Sign Up”.
Request an invite to my server.

Send me a message with the e-mail address that you used to create your Plex account.
Wait for the invite.

You should receive an e-mail from Plex once it’s done. Click on “I accept the invitation”.
Open my Plex web client and sign in.

The default settings are dumb

…let’s fix them.

Plex provides shitty content and questionable “news” by default while hiding the things that we actually want to access.

Navigate to the settings (tools icon in the top right) and change the following things to your liking:

Plex Web > General > Language Set your preferred interface language
Plex Web > General > Time Format I need at least 24 hours
Plex Web > Quality > Video quality I recommend “8 Mbps, 1080p”, do not set it too high
Online Media Sources ❗ Please set everything to “disabled”. This is not useful.
Account > Language Set your preferred interface language (again, because it was so much fun last time)
Account > Audio & Subtitle Settings Set your preferred content language and configure when subtitles are shown
Account > Username Usernames are nicer than e-mails, but it’s optional
Account > Newsletter No, thanks.

Afterwards go to the home page. Click on “More” and pin categories under the header “irgendwr NAS” that you want to access (such as Movies and Shows), unpin everything that you are not interested in.

You should now have a usable interface. Feel free to ask me for help if anything is unclear.

Note: Quality, audio language and subtitles can be changed individually while watching something (settings icon in the bottom right).

Additional comments

It would be nice if you could provide interesting (to you or other participating people) content to increase our collection (preferably high definition, but whatever). We can always remove content that no one is interested in later, in case storage is full.