Plex
Video Storage
Managing a multimedia library can be tedious and time-consuming. Organizing your saved movies and TV shows into a streamable format requires effort to index, sort, and optimize the video files for playback. Fortunately, programs like Plex exist to make this easier. Plex is a media player platform that provides clients for desktop, mobile, and TV devices. These clients can stream from online services or your own downloaded videos.
Video Playback from Anywhere
With the Storj decentralized video storage service, your multimedia objects are available anywhere, at any time. Decentralized video storage offers many advantages over traditional centralized storage. These include higher availability, better security, and a lower operating budget.
With decentralized storage, your videos are distributed across a global network of nodes. This ensures more reliable access with fewer single points of failure. For that same reason, your files are not vulnerable to the security measures that may or may not exist for one central data repository. Additionally, Storj's network eliminates many of the maintenance and engineering costs of centralized object storage services.
The ability to store and retrieve your video files from anywhere using Storj's global network is great for hosting the files. But what about streaming and playback? Connecting Storj as the multimedia backend to a service like Plex would give the advantages of both services. Specifically, that means we want reliable, decentralized storage with convenient streaming playback. Thankfully this is all possible!
Setting up Storj with Plex Using Rclone
Rclone is a program that helps with the management of files on various cloud storage services. It provides a command called rclone mount that allows files on cloud storage to be mounted as a local filesystem.
For this guide, we are going to show how to set up Rclone to sync your local files with Storj. This can then serve as your storage backend for a service like Plex.
Getting Started
You should start by reading the Rclone. Follow the steps to configure your Storj access credentials using the rclone config command.
These docs show how to run basic commands to sync files from your local system to Storj buckets, but we would like to go a step further and mount a Storj bucket as its own filesystem. This will provide persistent storage for our video streaming service.
Mounting the Filesystem
The rclone mount command can be used to mount a cloud storage service as a local filesystem. With this enabled, Rclone can bidirectionally copy new files to Storj and read them from your buckets for playback in the Plex client.
Mount your file directories with this command:
This command does a few things:
rclone mount Storj:media X:\maps torclone mount <remote>:<path/to/files> <path/to/local/mount>, where<remote>is the Storj interface configured with Rclone following the steps in Getting Started,<path/to/files>is the location in the Storj bucket where media files will be hosted, and<path/to/local/mount>is the directory on your local system that the Storj service should be mounted as.--vfs-cache-mode fullsets the VFS file cache settings for optimal file cache buffering--dir-cache-time 1hsets the directory cache time to one hour--read-onlyspecifies that the mount should be read-only--no-checksumdisables checksums for better performance--no-modtimeprevents modification times from being written so that Plex doesn't pick them up as changed files--rcenables remote control of Rclone via its API. This will be used to issue commands to sync the Rclone mount below.
Syncing New Files to Storj With Rclone
Even though your Storj bucket is now mounted to your local filesystem, you may want to add new files to your Plex setup. In order to do this, we can move the files to the mounted buckets and tell Rclone to sync the entire system while it is running.
To move new files to your Storj bucket, we can use the rclone move command like so:
The flags in this command such as --transfers may require some tweaking to work best based on your available CPU and memory. But the command is essentially copying files from the local D:\shows\ directory to the media/shows/ folder in our Storj bucket.
Refreshing the Local Sync Location
Now that the files have been copied, we need to notify the mounted Rclone directory to refresh its contents. We can issue commands directly to the Rclone mount while it is running thanks to the --rc flag that was passed to it when we set up the mount. This is done by running rclone rc.
Sync your Rclone mount with this command:
This recursively refreshes the root directory of the Rclone mount to pick up the newly uploaded files in Storj.
Tip: You can even run rclone move and rclone rc vfs/refresh on a script or job to automatically keep your multimedia service up-to-date.
Wrapping Up
Now that you've set up Rclone to read and write to your Storj buckets, you can configure Plex to use your mounted buckets as a storage location. Some tips for configuring Plex with this setup are:
Under Settings > Library, uncheck "empty trash automatically after each scan"
Check "use partial scan" so that Plex doesn't scan the entire Storj mount every time new content is discovered
These, along with the other steps we took while setting up the mount, will help optimize Plex performance when reading from Storj.
With Plex configured to use Storj for storage, you now have a convenient streaming and organization platform backed by reliable, decentralized object storage.