You will need to login as this account to Windows and make sure that it has read access to your media files.

You can see my service account below named Plexsvc Open the Windows computer management console (compmgmt.msc) and create a user account to run the Plex service. The only downside to skipping this step is that you will need to leave a user permanently logged in for Plex to work. If you need Hardware transcoding skip this step. I’ve had some feedback from the Plex community that this step will actually stop you from being able to use Hardware Transcoding. Wait for the installer to finish and then click close

Once you have the installation file downloaded run the installer and click Install Installationįirst you will need to download Plex Media Server from here. If you are a free Plex user you can just skip any steps that don’t apply to you. A lot of the features in this guide make use of the Plex Pass which is a paid subscription. We will configure the running of Plex as a Windows service later on. By default Plex runs in the profile of a logged in user. This guide will run through the entire process of setting up a working Plex Media Server in Windows. In later posts I will discuss how to monitor with Tautulli and how to setup Sonar to dynamically add content. For this post I will go over all the necessary steps to setup a Plex server.

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