Software & Apps

Hi, everyone!

Since the new Ray Portal node from Blender 4.2 requires quite a bit of math to work as a portal node, I created ‘Easy Portal’ to make it work as expected!

Let me know what you think!

You can get it here (go to the Gumroad link from here): 

My Twitter (I'm working on more cool stuff):

I would love to see what you create with it! So tag me if you post on Twitter!

Update 2: This blew up! Thank you so much for the support! You all rock! Now at 53 downloads and someone even donated $10 (Thanks, man, you're awesome!)!

Update 1 from the mods about the link issues: 'Gumroad links trigger the auto mod. All posts and comments containing them are automatically flagged for manual review to cut down on spam.'

Ban is set to be announced Thursday and within 100 days all sales, downloads, and future updates will be stopped including virus definitions and product updates.

Edit: US Commerce Department has officially unveiled the ban will come into force September 29th 2024. Also other products that whitelabel Kaspersky engines/technology into their products will also be barred. Both Russian and the UK units of the company are on the entity list, with the UK unit barred from receiving any goods from American suppliers.

I've been a Plex user since 2014 (and have been a happy lifetime pass holder for a while) and have been running it for the past how ever many years on a "frankenstein rig" of various parts (old i7-2600 CPU...if you want more details, you can see here: ).

It's worked just fine (just use it in the house, no transcoding except for when I connect to it while travelling and am using a Chromecast), but I've been wanting to add to the server I run Plex on, along with what the "media server" would be doing/handling in general alongside Plex. All of the TV's in the house are Roku 4k HDR televisions, handles everything (at least that I have on my server) without transcoding (picture anyway, some audio transcodes).

I've been wanting to switch to Linux for a while now, not only for the reduced overhead, but because I wanted to do a number of things that either wouldn't be possible or are simply very difficult/convoluted to do with Windows. More than that, I really enjoy tinkering around with PC's and I think I just needed an excuse to try and learn/use Linux haha. Another catalyst was that we finally got fiber in our area, so I was able to drop Comcast (win in and of itself) and switch to symmetrical 900mbps up/down internet for way less than what I was paying comcast (for slower speeds).

For the "new" server, I went with a used Dell Optiplex 5050 with an i7-7700, 16gb of RAM and 500gb SSD. Got it for $120. Took the motherboard out of it and put it into my old server case (as my old server case has significantly more room). Also added a SATA PCIe expansion card (that was something like $20-$30 on Amazon).

Variety of issues/things I wanted to stop having to deal with on my old server:

• I had a separate drive for Music, Movies and Shows. Anytime I'd fill up one of the drives, I'd just buy a larger drive and transfer the content. I didn't have the (easy) ability to simply plug in another drive and not have to change configurations of things like QB or my aRR's.

• I use ExpressVPN (via OpenVPN, not ExpressVPN's app) on my server, and to be sure that I could access Plex when travelling, I have to always make 100% sure that I had a static route to Plex's servers configured in my configuration file. If Plex changed their IP or if the restart of my VPN found a different IP then I'd lose remote access.

• Just the general annoyance of Windows. I run it "headless" and even with as much tinkering with the settings of Windows as possible, there'd still be occasional reboots or times that I simply was forced to reboot.

• This is less of an issue with Windows as it was with it simply being an old PC, but I have my ENTIRE home "smart" with advanced rules/programming/devices using HomeAssistant (running on a raspberry pi). I wanted to add things like MotionEye & Frigate for camera feed processing (think facial recognition, package detection, pet detection, etc). Way too much for the old server to handle. Also needed to add an HDHomeRun, IPTV using xTeve.

There are some other things, but that's the gist. So I decided to take the plunge and go with Ubuntu Server (made the mistake of going with ubuntu 24.04, so there is presently an issue with no HDR tone mapping if I'm transcoding content, but that's only happening when I'm travelling so I'm hoping that gets resolved in a future update).

For anyone who comes across this and wants some "takeaways" on my setup, they are as follows:

Most importantly (to me) was the setup of my drives. As I mentioned above, I've slowly accumulated drives over the years using Plex on Windows, because as I'd fill them up, I'd transition to a larger drive. I've got a total of 26TB of storage across my existing 7 drives (inclusive of the three in what was my windows server). I went ahead and put the old drives into the new server, got them all formatted as EXT4 drives. I then used MergerFS to create an "aggregate drive".

For those unfamiliar, mergerfs allows me to simply add/remove drives at will into a larger "aggregate drive", meaning if I've got two physical drives (drive A and drive B, can be any size, they don't have to match...so let's say its one 1TB drive and one 2TB drive) I can use mergerfs to create a 3TB "drive C". I then write files to drive C and it decides onto which drive to place the file. It automatically writes to the drive with the largest percentage of space available and automatically balances data across all drives, but without splitting any file across more than one drive. I specifically wanted something without any parity or any striping. I wanted it setup so that if a drive failed, I simply lose whatever is on that drive and can take it out, plug in another drive, and just re-add anything that's now gone, without affecting my other drives. I could care less about parity because there's nothing on the drives that can't simply be...added again, let's say. The lack of striping was most important, because that would mean losing a drive would lose the whole array or drives.

So I now have a 26TB "Media Drive" that has Movies, Shows and Music folders, and that's the drive I write files to. I have Plex setup to read from the actual individual drives themselves.

Other things should someone find them helpful:

• Using "qmcgaw/gluetun" docker - in a nutshell, this allows me to run my VPN completely isolated from the rest of the machine, and then "connect" other things like QB to it. It manages the VPN connection (restarts it should it go down) and It's a "bulletproof" setup, in that if it goes down/disconnects there is absolutely no way for QB to continue to function correctly. This means that the rest of my server is simply using my LAN, which means I have zero worry about not having 100% remote access uptime, and the speed of my aRRs and everything else isn’t affected, as they’re just run through my LAN (not exposed to the WAN btw).

• Using "linuxserver/qb" docker connected to the gluetun docker

• Using Kometa docker (formerly Plex Media Manager

• Using all of the aRR's, not in a docker container

• Using xTeve, not in a docker (this is for my IPTV for use in Plex, along with my HDHomeRun for local channels). I went with a HDHR4-2US for anyone curious, it works phenomenally well.

• Using Frigate docker

• Using MotionEye (snap install) - will be removing motioneye after my coral TPU arrives and just sticking with Frigate

Overall experience setting everything up:

A giant pain in the ass lol. I had zero Linux experience going into this. It took me about a day of research just to even find the appropriate solutions for things (gluetun alongside QB for example, along with mergerfs over something like LVM for the hard drive solution). All in all, from start to finish, it took me all of a Saturday, Sunday and Monday evening to get everything working correctly.

Has it been worth it? ABSOLUTELY. If you don't already have experience with Linux, I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're the type to get enjoyment out of problem solving, tinkering with PC's, googling things (lots and lots of googling) and just generally have PC's as a hobby of yours.

This thing absolutely FLIES. 4k transcoding is basically instant, load times are instant, it's just such a tremendous upgrade in performance. The power/resource usage even with all of the other stuff I put on there is basically nill. It's fantastic. I'll have this thing running like this for probably the next 10 years lol. I've already got an "uptime" of 18 days with no issues whatsoever. Can't wait for that to be 365+ days.

EDIT: To elaborate even a bit further, I’m at 18 days uptime, just checked QB and I’ve got over 3,000gb of data downloads, have Kometa running twice a day, have MotionEye live monitoring 3 RTSP camera feeds, my father in law currently watching live TV from Plex (IPTV), along with everything else that’s running and I’m at less than 3gb of RAM in use. Not only have I had to fiddle with absolutely nothing in the past 18 days (all VPN issues are “self healing”), but there’s no memory leaks or anything that even approaches a lack of stability.

Processing power aside (which I reference in one of my replies) Windows was just never even remotely this stable.

Anyway, just wanted to share my enthusiasm with some who might care. While my wife is definitely enjoying the upgrades (as they're very noticeable), she doesn't care to talk about "how the sausage is made" so to speak, she just wants to "enjoy the sandwich".