Plex

Running Plex gives you an awesome media experience! This documents its docker-compose.yml file and additional add-ons.

version: '3'
services:
  plex:
    container_name: plex
    image: plexinc/pms-docker
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - TZ=US/Chicago
      - PLEX_CLAIM=claim-YOURSECRETCLAIM
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./transcode:/transcode
      - /srv/location1/media/public:/data:ro
    devices:
      # Allows for hardware transcoding
      - "/dev/dri:/dev/dri"

Additions

Here are some cool programs you can use to supplement your Plex installation:

• Plex Meta Manager - automatically create cool collections

• Tautulli - view cool statistics about your server. (Becomes irrelevant if you use Plex Dash: https://www.plex.tv/plex-labs/)

• Varken - send Plex statistics to InfluxDB for viewing on a Grafana frontend

• Servarr has good documentation for things to use alongside Plex

• Here’s a GitHub with many docker compose files: https://github.com/vaeyo/MediaServer-DockerComposeFiles

Transcoding

Hardware Transcoding in Docker

To enable hardware transcoding for a Docker install of plex, you must add /dev/dri as a device. You should not do this if you have an integrated graphics as I have found Plex thinks it’s hardware transcoding, but is actually worse than if HW transcoding was disabled.

You can run this command to see infomration about your GPU:

# Credit to https://askubuntu.com/a/392944/756467
lspci | grep ' VGA ' | cut -d" " -f 1 | xargs -i lspci -v -s {}

Subtitles and Transcoding

Sometimes using subtitles will require Plex to transcode to burn-in the subtitles. More info here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subtitles-to-your-media/