The Old Laptop That Runs Our TV

Our TV plays movies off a laptop from 2016, a Dell Inspiron 15 7559. The laptop runs Plex, which serves a movie library to the Plex app on the TV. That's the whole job.

It sits on my desk with the lid closed, always on the charger.

Why an old laptop is enough

Sometimes the TV can't play a file as it is, so Plex converts it on the fly. That conversion is the heavy part. Intel's built-in graphics chips happen to be good at exactly this, so the laptop hands the work to its graphics chip instead of grinding through it on the main processor.

Plex runs directly on the laptop for the same reason. The other apps live in containers, which are sealed-off boxes for each app, but Plex needs a clear line to the graphics chip. The movies sit on a separate drive.

The app that died quietly

Horsepower was never the problem. One of the helper apps that run next to Plex was. Every so often it stopped working without crashing, so nothing looked wrong from the outside. It just wasn't doing its job anymore.

The cause was plain. The app was looking up internet addresses through the wrong lookup service, a bit like asking the wrong phone book, and those lookups failed. Pointing it at a normal one cured it.

Automatic restarts went in at the same time, for the next thing that breaks. The helper apps got health checks: once a minute, the system asks each one a simple question, and three failed answers in a row mark it unhealthy. A tiny extra app called autoheal looks at those results every 30 seconds and restarts anything marked unhealthy. Nobody has to notice first.

Who gets to see what

The helper apps' admin pages only answer over Tailscale, a private network that lets me reach the laptop from anywhere. Plex stays open on the home network, because the TV has to find it without any extra setup.

The update that lost the server

A daily cloud backup already covered the other apps' settings, but not Plex's. One manual Plex update is why that changed: it lost Plex's setup. Plex knows a server by an ID kept in a small settings file. Lose that file and Plex sees a stranger, so the server has to be claimed again under your account. That's what happened here.

Now Plex's settings are in that backup too. It runs every day, is encrypted on the laptop before it goes to Backblaze B2, and keeps a week of daily copies, four weekly ones, and six monthly ones. To stay under B2's free 10 GB, it skips posters and thumbnails, which Plex can rebuild. It keeps the settings file, the library database, and the watch history.

The posters can come back on their own. The ID can't, so that's the part that leaves the house every day.

I haven't had to touch the laptop in months.