**Setting Up FreeNAS Media Server**

For those looking to set up a media server using FreeNAS, this tutorial will guide you through the process of creating a dedicated server for serving music and video content. As we begin, it's essential to note that this is just an example setup, and hardware specifications may vary depending on individual needs.

To start, we'll be using a relatively powerful machine with plenty of storage space to serve our media files. The idea is that whatever hardware you have will work with FreeNAS, as long as it's not too low-end. This rising star shows us that even the humblest of machines can become a powerhouse when paired with the right software.

In this setup, we'll be using Plex Media Server as our primary application. We've already set up our initial configuration and are now ready to connect our client machine. Keep in mind that we're not directly accessing the screen from this server; instead, we're using a separate machine behind Christa to capture the output.

For music streaming, we'll be utilizing the Mad Sonic plugin, which is an open-source alternative to Subsonic. This plugin offers more flexibility and customization options, making it an excellent choice for those looking to stream their music library. To install the plugin, we simply click on it, select "Install," and follow the prompts to complete the setup.

**Adding Storage and Media Folders**

Once our plugin is installed, we'll move on to adding storage folders and media sources. In a real-world scenario, you'd typically have separate jails for video and audio content; however, we're opting for simplicity by combining both into one jail. To create this folder, we navigate back to the left-hand jail menu, select "Add Storage," and choose "Form." We'll then set the destination path to our existing media storage location.

**Configuring Mad Sonic**

With our plugin installed and storage folders in place, it's time to configure Mad Sonic. Logging into the admin panel, we'll navigate to the "Installed Plugins" section and select our Mad Sonic plugin. After enabling it, we'll find that it's now available at the top of the list.

The next step involves setting up our media source within Mad Sonic. We've already set up our jail to look for files in our existing media storage location. To configure this further, we'll select "Media" as the folder destination and enter a specific path (e.g., "/music"). By adding files manually or through automated indexing, we can ensure that our media library is regularly updated.

**Client-Side Access**

Now that our Mad Sonic server is up and running, it's time to access our content from a client machine. With FreeNAS as the central hub, you can easily serve your media content to any PC in your home network. To take this setup to the next level, consider using game consoles or even a Raspberry Pi device as an additional client.

Plex offers transcoding options for video streaming, which can be particularly useful when dealing with large files or those with high processing requirements. This feature allows you to process the video on the machine with more horsepower, such as your FreeNAS server, and stream it directly to the client device without having to perform any processing there.

**Virtual Machines in FreeNAS**

One of the lesser-known features of FreeNAS is its ability to run virtual machines (VMs). For those wondering why we needed so much RAM on our original machine, the answer lies in the potential for creating multiple VMs. By utilizing this feature, you can spin up multiple instances of your favorite operating system or even use it as a dedicated media server.

While we won't be exploring virtual machines in-depth here, it's worth noting that FreeNAS offers this functionality, making it an excellent choice for those looking to expand their capabilities beyond traditional media serving. As always, stay tuned for future tutorials and updates on how to get the most out of your FreeNAS setup.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhere we are with our media server / FreeNAS video part 2 series part 2 some people complain that we didn't go really in depth with the FreeNAS installation it's pretty basic we're not gonna go back over it but you plug in the USB you set it up and ask you questions and you go through a wizard or you set things a magician as the case may be if you set up your shares it's pretty basic alright gonna have to figure that one out for yourself if you haven't already of course this is 2nd video go back and watch the first one but today we're gonna talk about plugins now of course the the overarching theme for this series is Christa's media server because she doesn't have one because I don't know anything about this so I'm learning too so we're gonna focus on the Plex plugin but first let's just talk about all the various plugins that are at your disposal and they're basically 1-click installs with a little bit of setup that you have with a default FreeNAS installation so there's a lot to choose from here and we'll just sort of go through them here of course we got this Bakula backup solution couch potato there are a lot of nzb specific applications here if you don't know what an nzb is I'm not gonna get any monetized by telling you but you should google it because it's really cool we would never tell never never never never use those got CrashPlan more backups mb is the other home media server a lot of people out of hate for plex in the comment section a lot of people said NV maybe we'll check that out too again at savvy nzb I'm gonna talk about it we're just looking we got some music we might actually we got the mad sonic here we might look at serving some music too because of course serving music we're making server another great use for it along with video that is a kind of media what look my no s Kristen oh good create and manage your Minecraft servers mine just went down because I stopped paying the fee so if you're a minecraft scrub I already built in for you I think that's got a mod manager and stuff too well let's meet of your own cloud service you want to run your own cloud you know the the big clouds they're not secure sorry roll your own cloud with FreeNAS Xcode we did on the Linux channel there's like channels amazing plex the eponymous we're gonna look at that and a little more in-depth more newsreaders sick rage sick rage sick rages more about NZ bees again we can't talk about that subsonic is probably the one we'll use for music download managers Manero minor that's a material minor with FreeNAS how great is that we've also got transmission and X to the N now these are torrent downloaders where you can just load in links and this works the same way for the nzb stuff which again we're not going to talk about now of course we're only talking about torrents for linux distros and things like that right not anything that has a copyright related to it no TV shows no music none of that only terrible people would do that but the cool thing about it is these things you have to remember that this is taking your personal computer out of the equation so you're queuing things up and you can automate it to you can actually automated to search for keywords and things like that and automatically pull in torrents and Enzi bees that fit your search descriptions it will run the parity checks it will repair the files if they need to be repaired with the parity files it will unpack them automatically and it will store them in sub der is based on the archive names all done for you all completely automated you come home and it's ready to go which is really amazing it's super amazing if you were downloading like seasons of a TV show but you're not gonna do that because that's illegal and it's wrong completely wrong and that's not the use case were for here level one was a lot of cool stuff that you can do but again we're gonna focus on Plex right now because we're just setting up our media server now it's a really as a little bit of a complexity complexity hahaha when you're installing these plugins so you have to so step one you have to find your plugin on the list and you have to click on it and see that blue highlight means that you clicked on okay what do i do again okay Stefon finding all this okay I've tracked it with your eyes read it no no I need the hard part for some people but comprehend you can read the description you might want to read it more than once they need to click on it what's the blue highlight now you see you got the transparent blue highlight and the less transparent blue highlight important to keep those separate so you've clicked it you've got the lettuce transparent blue highlight then you're going to click install and you wait now at this point step three you know a little more complexity you're gonna get the are you sure screen and you know remember to say okay to that at this point freeness is gonna go and fetch everything you download it and install it now Plex again we've got a lot of hardcore people saying MB is the way to go Plex does have some paid components and it even has like some software-as-a-service components but it will work just fine in the free version and that's what we're going to use and maybe we will take a look at him be in a future video but for the Plex haters it is possible to use it for free just keep that money so that's it for installing Plex pretty simple but there is a little bit more to it so one of the things about free hands that you have to keep in mind these plugins it's built with compartmentalization in mind so you don't necessarily want your minecraft server to have access to your video files and so it uses something called jails so you keep certain files and jails that are basically you keep your plugins and jails that they can only get to certain media certain folders or certain parts we can ask not everything else so the second part of setting up the plugin is deciding what it has access to and on the left side over here we've got our jails menu and you see we have plex media server underscore one now the plex install went ahead and set that up for us we didn't do anything there but we do have to figure out what stores you want to put into it by clicking this add storage selection here and of course we had multiple jails we could choose it here we've only got the one created so far and now we're going to have to choose what the source and I forgot we called it time pod we've got fanfic we've got our Tod pod we've got our fanfics folder that's we're just gonna put everything in our fanfic folder we're not gonna bother creating another folder all our media is gonna be dumped in here so we'll go ahead and choose that as our source destination next we want to set the destination and this is where it's going to show up in the duplex app and we've already got a media folder here so since this is our media server that's all we're gonna set it as and we've got our create directory check there please wait and here we go we have set up our slash media which is going to source from Tai pod my projects that's where we'll dump our media we want plagues to have access to so if we look on the life we look at our plugins we've got plex media server here but we're not ready for that yet a little bit counterintuitive but we need to go back to our plugins tab over here and there's an installed plugins tab and of course if you're if you have strong detective skills you can see why this wouldn't immediately work and that's because it's off he's got that bigger read off button so we're gonna click on that and launch it oh it didn't turn green it turned blue that's awful it ain't right Hey right so now it's on now of course plugins on the top is different than plugins on the left which yeah that's a little counterintuitive so now we're gonna go back to plugins on the left we're gonna click on plex media server we're ready - we're ready for plex media server right let's click on OK oh wait nothing happened oh so wait let's you know like in when you're in second grade and they gave you that test and the last question was like the second question was if you are reading this don't answer any other questions we didn't read and we would have failed what it actually says is this tiny little link here says click here guy says play best UI but it is free so we're not gonna complain too much and here we are we've lost Plex at this point we're gonna have to login so once you've logged in to Plex you can use Google or Facebook if you want you were gonna get this screen and it's gonna start to ask you about accessing a plex pass do you want to get to your media outside your home now this is the pay for part of place so you might want to say no to that disable it whatever it's that's maybe not a terrible service you know they are not really paying for any sort of extra functionality it's just a convenience thing right no you there are parts of this thing that won't work with just the bass you know while we're doing is a an in-home media server which we can do but if you want to stream this elsewhere they have that service okay so we'll leave it checked now of course it's automatically found our plex media server underscore 1 which we just turned on so we will let it go with that so now we've gotten to the next step it's found our server now we're gonna add a library which it sort of does internal cataloging and wants you to decide what kind of thing this is gonna be I'm gonna make an admission here we didn't actually rip any video media on that so we're gonna do music because we actually have some music and we'll name it music because we're not creative so we set up our jail a slash media that's what we'll feed it for our movie server and we'll add our library oh that's awesome music now again it's gonna harass us to get like zaps and do more things all that but we're done we're not gonna fall for it so we're gonna click that down button and here we are we've got our music folder there are no items in this library but we expected that so it turns out my circa 2004 IDE external hard drive with all my epic threes on it it's bad surprise what a heartbreaker some good things on that but we did manage to scrounge up some tracks of course weird al' cuz that's all it wasn't happen he's a freak yeah holy this is still weird out but we did we found some Smashing Pumpkins - yeah I can't go wrong with the Smashing Pumpkins right so now we have copied all of this media directly into our folder that we created our tied pod folder that we set up to work with Plex and of course plex one of the nice things it does it will actually go out and fetch the album information and art and everything and set it up right here for us so now we have a functional plex media server running oh we should also mention that we transplanted free dance into this little guy because we didn't want to carry around the big server anymore I just by we you mean I carry around the big server anymore this is a team effort team effort why to take credit for everything so this just goes to show you that you know whatever hardware you got will work with this as long as it's not too crappy this is a rising so this is a total overkill cuz but here we are we're serving music video would have been the same thing which is copied in there after doing that initial setup and how we got our plex media server running and we're ready for a client machine which actually you're not looking at the screen from this this is just running a server there's a computer over here behind Christa that we're screen capturing from so we're actually accessing this over the network with with our place now of course we originally meant to show you video we're showing you music but sort of just you know just just happen that way but plex does have some issues with streaming music it'll probably be okay but since we're talking about music we should mention that there are plugins specifically for music so you've got subsonic which you've also got mad Sonic and this is one of these you know like in my sequel Maria DB Forks where people got angry there was an angry fork and I think I think mad sonic is the more open-source version of that so we're gonna go with that one and again we'll follow it saying click on it click install in order to get our plugin now same drill of course in a real world scenario you would have a jail for your media for your video probably in a jail for your audio we're gonna be lazy so we're gonna go back to our left hand jail menu and add storage form add sonic and it is going to be the same folder destination we'll also be one day when you can tie it this keyboard is so awkward I'll also make it media the exact same place as before again you could separate the two we're not gonna bother now don't forget that last step going to the installed plugins turn it on and that sonic can be found here at the top our mad sonic is not secured yet as it still is someone log on with admin and then of course you would change that immediately so the after you log in to your client side of mad sonic it's a matter of telling it where to look for your media course slash media we've set up already our jail to look for this and index the files now you can set up how often you want to index so you'll operate a media folder you'll add to it and then every day or every hour whatever you set up it'll go and find the music you know so trigger that manually on that admin page but once we've found that we've got these the side menu and here we go we've got our Family Guy look like we're down made it know where he is oh you know what he's under there he was categorized with family guys so maybe some manuals were structure was a little weird on that but we did get our disc two of the Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits which is that's all we care about and we've got our player down here I don't think we've got any of course we can't play copyright music knew we'd never do that you do punish us hard you know we own this music you can't hear it but that is so flex myotonic you've got your video you've got your audio and you essentially with this setup have media serving to whatever PC client you want in your home so that pretty much wraps it up for media servers again this is freenas at the moment but what you're seeing on the screen is actually just another machine that's acting as a client now with plex one of the advantages is you can use your game consoles you could build a Raspberry Pi solution to access Plex and we're talking about video Plex has some transcoding options I don't know if any of those are paywall but you can actually do the transcoding of the video on the machine that has a lot of horsepower your FreeNAS machine and stream it directly to the Raspberry Pi so the Raspberry Pi doesn't have to process it the point is there's a lot of different clients you can use to access Plex and it's probably true for a lot of the plugins in the the FreeNAS solution but that's not all free dance can do free - free Nass can also run virtual machines if you remember our original server a lot of people make comments as like why would you need that much RAM it's ridiculous you're over killing we don't have access to that well the answer is we had planned maybe showing you virtual machines and if we're spinning up a bunch of virtual machines all that 72 gigs of RAM comes in really handy and you know the processing power so stay tuned and we would probably take a look at running virtual machines and freenas that you can also use alongside your new media server let us know if you're interested bye youhere we are with our media server / FreeNAS video part 2 series part 2 some people complain that we didn't go really in depth with the FreeNAS installation it's pretty basic we're not gonna go back over it but you plug in the USB you set it up and ask you questions and you go through a wizard or you set things a magician as the case may be if you set up your shares it's pretty basic alright gonna have to figure that one out for yourself if you haven't already of course this is 2nd video go back and watch the first one but today we're gonna talk about plugins now of course the the overarching theme for this series is Christa's media server because she doesn't have one because I don't know anything about this so I'm learning too so we're gonna focus on the Plex plugin but first let's just talk about all the various plugins that are at your disposal and they're basically 1-click installs with a little bit of setup that you have with a default FreeNAS installation so there's a lot to choose from here and we'll just sort of go through them here of course we got this Bakula backup solution couch potato there are a lot of nzb specific applications here if you don't know what an nzb is I'm not gonna get any monetized by telling you but you should google it because it's really cool we would never tell never never never never use those got CrashPlan more backups mb is the other home media server a lot of people out of hate for plex in the comment section a lot of people said NV maybe we'll check that out too again at savvy nzb I'm gonna talk about it we're just looking we got some music we might actually we got the mad sonic here we might look at serving some music too because of course serving music we're making server another great use for it along with video that is a kind of media what look my no s Kristen oh good create and manage your Minecraft servers mine just went down because I stopped paying the fee so if you're a minecraft scrub I already built in for you I think that's got a mod manager and stuff too well let's meet of your own cloud service you want to run your own cloud you know the the big clouds they're not secure sorry roll your own cloud with FreeNAS Xcode we did on the Linux channel there's like channels amazing plex the eponymous we're gonna look at that and a little more in-depth more newsreaders sick rage sick rage sick rages more about NZ bees again we can't talk about that subsonic is probably the one we'll use for music download managers Manero minor that's a material minor with FreeNAS how great is that we've also got transmission and X to the N now these are torrent downloaders where you can just load in links and this works the same way for the nzb stuff which again we're not going to talk about now of course we're only talking about torrents for linux distros and things like that right not anything that has a copyright related to it no TV shows no music none of that only terrible people would do that but the cool thing about it is these things you have to remember that this is taking your personal computer out of the equation so you're queuing things up and you can automate it to you can actually automated to search for keywords and things like that and automatically pull in torrents and Enzi bees that fit your search descriptions it will run the parity checks it will repair the files if they need to be repaired with the parity files it will unpack them automatically and it will store them in sub der is based on the archive names all done for you all completely automated you come home and it's ready to go which is really amazing it's super amazing if you were downloading like seasons of a TV show but you're not gonna do that because that's illegal and it's wrong completely wrong and that's not the use case were for here level one was a lot of cool stuff that you can do but again we're gonna focus on Plex right now because we're just setting up our media server now it's a really as a little bit of a complexity complexity hahaha when you're installing these plugins so you have to so step one you have to find your plugin on the list and you have to click on it and see that blue highlight means that you clicked on okay what do i do again okay Stefon finding all this okay I've tracked it with your eyes read it no no I need the hard part for some people but comprehend you can read the description you might want to read it more than once they need to click on it what's the blue highlight now you see you got the transparent blue highlight and the less transparent blue highlight important to keep those separate so you've clicked it you've got the lettuce transparent blue highlight then you're going to click install and you wait now at this point step three you know a little more complexity you're gonna get the are you sure screen and you know remember to say okay to that at this point freeness is gonna go and fetch everything you download it and install it now Plex again we've got a lot of hardcore people saying MB is the way to go Plex does have some paid components and it even has like some software-as-a-service components but it will work just fine in the free version and that's what we're going to use and maybe we will take a look at him be in a future video but for the Plex haters it is possible to use it for free just keep that money so that's it for installing Plex pretty simple but there is a little bit more to it so one of the things about free hands that you have to keep in mind these plugins it's built with compartmentalization in mind so you don't necessarily want your minecraft server to have access to your video files and so it uses something called jails so you keep certain files and jails that are basically you keep your plugins and jails that they can only get to certain media certain folders or certain parts we can ask not everything else so the second part of setting up the plugin is deciding what it has access to and on the left side over here we've got our jails menu and you see we have plex media server underscore one now the plex install went ahead and set that up for us we didn't do anything there but we do have to figure out what stores you want to put into it by clicking this add storage selection here and of course we had multiple jails we could choose it here we've only got the one created so far and now we're going to have to choose what the source and I forgot we called it time pod we've got fanfic we've got our Tod pod we've got our fanfics folder that's we're just gonna put everything in our fanfic folder we're not gonna bother creating another folder all our media is gonna be dumped in here so we'll go ahead and choose that as our source destination next we want to set the destination and this is where it's going to show up in the duplex app and we've already got a media folder here so since this is our media server that's all we're gonna set it as and we've got our create directory check there please wait and here we go we have set up our slash media which is going to source from Tai pod my projects that's where we'll dump our media we want plagues to have access to so if we look on the life we look at our plugins we've got plex media server here but we're not ready for that yet a little bit counterintuitive but we need to go back to our plugins tab over here and there's an installed plugins tab and of course if you're if you have strong detective skills you can see why this wouldn't immediately work and that's because it's off he's got that bigger read off button so we're gonna click on that and launch it oh it didn't turn green it turned blue that's awful it ain't right Hey right so now it's on now of course plugins on the top is different than plugins on the left which yeah that's a little counterintuitive so now we're gonna go back to plugins on the left we're gonna click on plex media server we're ready - we're ready for plex media server right let's click on OK oh wait nothing happened oh so wait let's you know like in when you're in second grade and they gave you that test and the last question was like the second question was if you are reading this don't answer any other questions we didn't read and we would have failed what it actually says is this tiny little link here says click here guy says play best UI but it is free so we're not gonna complain too much and here we are we've lost Plex at this point we're gonna have to login so once you've logged in to Plex you can use Google or Facebook if you want you were gonna get this screen and it's gonna start to ask you about accessing a plex pass do you want to get to your media outside your home now this is the pay for part of place so you might want to say no to that disable it whatever it's that's maybe not a terrible service you know they are not really paying for any sort of extra functionality it's just a convenience thing right no you there are parts of this thing that won't work with just the bass you know while we're doing is a an in-home media server which we can do but if you want to stream this elsewhere they have that service okay so we'll leave it checked now of course it's automatically found our plex media server underscore 1 which we just turned on so we will let it go with that so now we've gotten to the next step it's found our server now we're gonna add a library which it sort of does internal cataloging and wants you to decide what kind of thing this is gonna be I'm gonna make an admission here we didn't actually rip any video media on that so we're gonna do music because we actually have some music and we'll name it music because we're not creative so we set up our jail a slash media that's what we'll feed it for our movie server and we'll add our library oh that's awesome music now again it's gonna harass us to get like zaps and do more things all that but we're done we're not gonna fall for it so we're gonna click that down button and here we are we've got our music folder there are no items in this library but we expected that so it turns out my circa 2004 IDE external hard drive with all my epic threes on it it's bad surprise what a heartbreaker some good things on that but we did manage to scrounge up some tracks of course weird al' cuz that's all it wasn't happen he's a freak yeah holy this is still weird out but we did we found some Smashing Pumpkins - yeah I can't go wrong with the Smashing Pumpkins right so now we have copied all of this media directly into our folder that we created our tied pod folder that we set up to work with Plex and of course plex one of the nice things it does it will actually go out and fetch the album information and art and everything and set it up right here for us so now we have a functional plex media server running oh we should also mention that we transplanted free dance into this little guy because we didn't want to carry around the big server anymore I just by we you mean I carry around the big server anymore this is a team effort team effort why to take credit for everything so this just goes to show you that you know whatever hardware you got will work with this as long as it's not too crappy this is a rising so this is a total overkill cuz but here we are we're serving music video would have been the same thing which is copied in there after doing that initial setup and how we got our plex media server running and we're ready for a client machine which actually you're not looking at the screen from this this is just running a server there's a computer over here behind Christa that we're screen capturing from so we're actually accessing this over the network with with our place now of course we originally meant to show you video we're showing you music but sort of just you know just just happen that way but plex does have some issues with streaming music it'll probably be okay but since we're talking about music we should mention that there are plugins specifically for music so you've got subsonic which you've also got mad Sonic and this is one of these you know like in my sequel Maria DB Forks where people got angry there was an angry fork and I think I think mad sonic is the more open-source version of that so we're gonna go with that one and again we'll follow it saying click on it click install in order to get our plugin now same drill of course in a real world scenario you would have a jail for your media for your video probably in a jail for your audio we're gonna be lazy so we're gonna go back to our left hand jail menu and add storage form add sonic and it is going to be the same folder destination we'll also be one day when you can tie it this keyboard is so awkward I'll also make it media the exact same place as before again you could separate the two we're not gonna bother now don't forget that last step going to the installed plugins turn it on and that sonic can be found here at the top our mad sonic is not secured yet as it still is someone log on with admin and then of course you would change that immediately so the after you log in to your client side of mad sonic it's a matter of telling it where to look for your media course slash media we've set up already our jail to look for this and index the files now you can set up how often you want to index so you'll operate a media folder you'll add to it and then every day or every hour whatever you set up it'll go and find the music you know so trigger that manually on that admin page but once we've found that we've got these the side menu and here we go we've got our Family Guy look like we're down made it know where he is oh you know what he's under there he was categorized with family guys so maybe some manuals were structure was a little weird on that but we did get our disc two of the Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits which is that's all we care about and we've got our player down here I don't think we've got any of course we can't play copyright music knew we'd never do that you do punish us hard you know we own this music you can't hear it but that is so flex myotonic you've got your video you've got your audio and you essentially with this setup have media serving to whatever PC client you want in your home so that pretty much wraps it up for media servers again this is freenas at the moment but what you're seeing on the screen is actually just another machine that's acting as a client now with plex one of the advantages is you can use your game consoles you could build a Raspberry Pi solution to access Plex and we're talking about video Plex has some transcoding options I don't know if any of those are paywall but you can actually do the transcoding of the video on the machine that has a lot of horsepower your FreeNAS machine and stream it directly to the Raspberry Pi so the Raspberry Pi doesn't have to process it the point is there's a lot of different clients you can use to access Plex and it's probably true for a lot of the plugins in the the FreeNAS solution but that's not all free dance can do free - free Nass can also run virtual machines if you remember our original server a lot of people make comments as like why would you need that much RAM it's ridiculous you're over killing we don't have access to that well the answer is we had planned maybe showing you virtual machines and if we're spinning up a bunch of virtual machines all that 72 gigs of RAM comes in really handy and you know the processing power so stay tuned and we would probably take a look at running virtual machines and freenas that you can also use alongside your new media server let us know if you're interested bye you\n"