So I have been facing indirect connections for a couple weeks now, I have been poking the problem with the awesome help of you guys on the forum, a little back story I was configured with a multi nic ubuntu server as my plex server, I have reconfigured my setup to be a single nic plex server behind a PFsense firewall. I have to be missing something simple as I am still stuck with indirect connections even on my local network behind the PFsense, the only way I can get a direct connection is if I am on local network and I enter in the private IP of the server.

So I enable remote connection, it spins for a bit, comes back and for about a second I get green text saying good to go, then that flips to red saying bad things happened.

Currently running into issues adding Movies to Plex on my Raspberry Pi. I basically followed this guide to install plex on my Pi. However after troubleshooting I've made a few changes. The external HDD which is holding all my media (NTFS) is mounted through /etc/fstab with this line:

• UUID=C6F65F98F65F8817 /mnt/MediaLibrary ntfs defaults,umask=007,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

It looks like all the permissions are correct (but from what I gather permissions aren't used for NTFS drives).
When attempting to add a folder I can see the files through plex but once the library is created Plex says 'There are no items in this Library'.

I've tried everything my google-fu can find so hopefully someone here knows what I'm doing wrong.

I recently added a Ubiquiti Security Gateway to my network and so I'm in a double NAT scenario. I configured my ISP router to forward 32400 to my USG and my USG to forward to my Plex server. This seemed to work fine since I can now access my Plex server both internally and externally (using public IP) via a browser. The problem I have is that when I look at the server settings in the Plex UI it shows the following...

What am I missing? Any help would be appreciated.

I just put Linux Mint on my desktop. I'm trying to set up my Plex server to find my media on one of my hard drives, but the folders don't show up when I try to browse for them, and Plex says they're empty when I type the path in manually. I searched around on this forum and it seems like it's a permissions problem. It looks like I need to change the permissions on the folder to make it accessible to other users. I tried using chown and chmod, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet. Can someone tell me exactly what I need to type into the terminal to fix this?

Hi All,

First off apologies if this is the wrong place to post. i figured linux and android were similar enough and there wasnt an android section for the media server
I just bought an android tv box off ebay. Nice one, 2.4ghz and 2gb ram
my intention was to use it to run all my media apps, kodi, plex, netflix, etc

Now the other part of it is i need a new machine to run my plex media centre, was looking for something low power that i can leave on most of the time (if not 24/7) so that i (and my friends/family) can access my plex remotely whenever needed, i figured this box would be perfect. did a little googling and found there was a media server app for andoitd

ive got the box, im in the app store but i cant seem to find the plex media server app. im assuming its not compatible with my box for whatever reason
just curious what the minimum specs are for the android version of the server?
are there any other, similar, apps that can act as a media server and that can be picked up by plex's media player?

So I cannot get plex to generate thumbnails. I use filebot to process my files, and then plex looks at the folder that filebot put the files in. So those folders have most of the thumbnails and such in them already, but for some reason plex will not generate a thumbnail or use the existing.

Not sure what to do to troubleshoot this. I have told it to refresh all mediadata for the library, that did not fix it. Not sure what else to try.

Hi Plexler

I am currently trying to build a script (python) with eyed3 to set mp3tags properly and add cover images (album & artist)
It works fine, except from the artist cover.

I place the tags with:
audiofile = eyed3.load(file)
cover_album_data = open(album_cover, "rb").read()
cover_artist_data = open(artist_cover, "rb").read()
audiofile.tag.images.set(3, cover_album_data, "image/jpeg") # set album cover
audiofile.tag.images.set(8, cover_artist_data, "image/jpeg") # set artist cover
audiofile.tag.save()

as I said, the album cover gets recognized by plex, the artist cover does not... any body around here who tried this or has any suggestions/ideas?
Does plex process the 'artist cover'-data from the mp3tag at all?

Hi,

I am using Plex with a secured connection via two ways:
plex.tv and my own domain.

The latter one uses a nginx proxy. This is working in general but it has some issues. It's slower than the other one and it's generating an inconsistent bandwidth.

One Problem is that the reverse proxy has to decrypt and encrypt the packages again to serve the subdomain. The best would be to allow the PMS to use a insecure connection in an internal network. I don't want to permit insecure connections in general. Only for the own subnet.

I hope there is a way to realize this.

best regards
spigandromeda

I just purchased a TS-451. I'm running 4 x 4TB HDD's RAID5. I have about 3.5 TB's of video. Everything is loaded and Plex libaries are fully updated. However streaming local AND over the internet is VERY slow. I only have a few days to return this NAS and either need to come up with a solution or go back to hosting on my PC. Any ideas on what to check? I'm desperate. I checked my QNAP and the processes and RAM utlization are very very low. QNAP only using less than 40-30% of RAM and less than 20% of processor. I had Plex previously on a server and the server was like 4x faster.

Hello,
i have a question.
I have a plex pass.
I have enabled option to Find trailers and extras automatically (Plex Pass required)
For some movies a have trailer, but for others not.
For example i don't have trailer for Valérian et la Cité des mille planètes (italian Version) that is very famous, and i have trailer for movie Happy Family (italian movie) that it is not so famous.
Why?
Am i doing somthing wrong?

I have a problem with playback or download of video from the website and with playback in the Plex Mac App. Everything works as expected on my iPad and iPhone.

I have Plex Server version 1.11.0.4666 running on a Tinkerboard running Armbian.

Everything works as expected except that playback and download stops randomly. The HTTPs connection for fetching the data is not closed, however the server simply stops providing data. It happens if the use the website or Mac Plex app to playback a movie. A single ".m4s" part of the movie will never complete being fetched over HTTPs and it will result in the playback stopping once that file is required. The same thing happens if I download the movie file directly from the website. Before completing the download, the server will stop providing data and the download will be stuck. The connection is still open, but there is just no data being served by the server. I have not been able to define a pattern for when exactly the download stops and it seems to be different every time. Sometimes if can fetch 50mb before it happens other times it happens after 200 mb, but I can also reproduce it.

The odd thing is that if I playback from the iOS app (either on iPad og iPhone), then everything works as expected!

Please note that this is not a problem where the hardware is not fast enough so it can serve the data for the playback, but instead it indicates some kind of bug in the server that triggers this lock. Since its happening both during playback and when downloading the raw video file I suspect it has something to do with the part of the server that serves files to the client.

I have attached a log where it happened during playback of a TV episode where it got stuck at one of the .m4s files and it resulted in the playback stopping unable to recover

I've just set-up the latest version of Raspbian on my Pi, and followed this guide to install Plex Media Server.

https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-plex-server/

I have connected an external HDD (AC powered) to the Pi, which has the name Silver. I've created one folder on this drive called TV.

When I connect the drive, it is shown at /media/pi/Silver

In PMS, the folder Silver shows up on the left hand side of the pane when I'm trying to add folders. However when I click on it, nothing happens and I can't see the TV folder.

My understanding is that I need to mount the drive, and possibly change some permissions? Does anyone have a link to a guide that I could follow?

Thanks.

I have an android device with Plex and PIA installed and running. I can get to the plex server (on the same network) without any problems to browse or stream. When I try to sync a video from the server to my Android device, it sits in "Pending" status forever because, according to it, it's not connected to wi-fi. (It says "Connect to wi-fi to sync".) The IP range of the local network that both devices are connected to is set to be bypassed by the android device with the VPN.

So, if I disable the VPN on the android device, it begins to download immediately, but I don't want to have to disable the VPN every time I want to sync a video. Is this expected/typical behavior? Is there some way that I can force the android Plex app to see this as wi-fi even when connected to the VPN?

I recently upgrade my router to Google WIFI because my old router was deficient. My cable modem remained the same and the wifi option is disable. Since switching to Google WIFI, my default IP address was changed in the process. I can still access my frenas server and all the contents from windows, however it took some searching because it's address changed as well. I tried turning on my plex plugin, but it shows "An Error Occurred". I'm i need to update the ip or subnet information, but I'm not sure what to do.

german language

Hallo,

ich bin Plex-Anfänger.
Ich benutze den aktuellen Mediaserver und Mint 18.3Cinnamon.
Meine Musikdateien, die in /media/georg/Daten/MyMusic liegen, werden nicht eingelesen.
Daten ist eine Partition.
Aus anderen Pfaden kann ich einlesen.

Danke

I'm running Plex Media Server 1.10.1.4602 on Ubuntu 16.04.

Summary:

Issue 1: Should I be seeing the 1.5x fudge factor in the logs if Deep Analysis has run? Is there anything else I can check there?

Issue 2: Should the 1.5x fudge factor be applied to constant rate encoded audio? The mediainfo tool reports that my optimized file (from video_transcoding, not Plex's built in Optimize) has a "Bit rate mode" of "Constant" for audio. There are no peaks in CBR, so it seems to me that it should not apply here. But from tests comparing the same encoding settings with and without audio, it seems that the 1.5x is being applied to the audio track bit rate too.

Issue 3: Why is the required bandwidth being inflated by 1.4x on top of the 1.5x fudge factor?

If this is all legitimate... with 160 kbps audio, I need to keep my video's average bit rate to 4000÷1.4÷1.5−160 = 1744 kbps. If it's not and these bugs could be fixed, my video's average bit rate could be (4000−160)÷1.5 = 2560 kbps. That's a significant difference in bit rate, and thus potential quality.

Details:

I would like to pre-transcode my videos to allow for Direct Play to mobile devices. This will allow me to handle more simultaneous streams, and I should be able to get better transcoding quality for a given bitrate by using a slower preset.

I initially used the Optimize feature to optimize a couple videos for mobile. Specifically, I picked "Optimize for Mobile". I expected them to be optimized to 720p @ 4 Mbps, which they were. I set my iPhone 7 (running iOS 11) to a quality level of 720p @ 4 Mbps. I expected this combination to result in Direct Play or at least Direct Stream.

Unfortunately, it didn't. From what I can see, this is because the bandwidth of the videos is too high. I did some tinkering using donmelton's video_transcoding tool, which you can find here if you're curious: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I used a 1 minute clip from the start of a movie. This allowed me to make slight adjustments and rapidly test to reverse engineer the bandwidth calculations. It seems that the bandwidth calculations are:
average_bitrate_of_file * 1.5 * 1.4

If this is greater than 4000000 bps, Direct Play is rejected. Looking at the big picture, that makes total sense. This leads to the question: where are the 1.5x and 1.4x coming from?

The 1.5x is the "fudge factor", which I understand is intended to account for the bursts in bitrate in VBR files. From some references, this may have been 2x in the past? Some references seem to indicate that the fudge factor should only be applied until Deep Analysis is run on the files. I believe Deep Analysis has run on the Plex Optimized files (but maybe not my test files while I was doing this), based on the fact that I get requiredBandwidth values if I look at the XML file info with &includeBandwidths=1 added to the URL. Yet I was still seeing the 1.5x fudge factor in the logs.

The 1.5x fudge factor, while not logged as such, also seems to apply to audio. This doesn't make sense for CBR audio.

So, if we have 4000000 bps to work with, from the above, I should expect that a file with a total bit rate of 4000000÷1.5 = 2666666 bps should Direct Play. However, files less than that still do not, and the error message in the logs indicates that the amount of required bandwidth is 1.4 times the 1.5 times the actual bit rate. In other words, I can only Direct Play a file if it is less than 4000000÷1.5÷1.4 = 1904761 bps average bit rate. Where is this 1.4x coming from?

Attached is a log snippet showing an example of the 1.4x calculation. This test clip has no audio track at all. The overall bit rate (mediainfo --Inform="General;%BitRate%" Clip3.mp4) is 2024468. 2024468×1.5 is 3036 kbps. I'm not sure why that's slightly off, but the log shows it as "3031Kbps based on 1.500000x fudge factor." From there, 3031 * 1.4 = 4243, which is approximately the 4245kbps from the error "Required bandwidth is 4245kbps" in the log.

This is not Mac specific. My PMS was running on Windows for a couple of years. Now I switched to Centos7 and the bug/feature still exists.

When a friend is watching a show or a movie it (sometimes) it gets marked as viewed (in the XML viewCount and lastViewed is set).

I'd rather not like this to happen in my library.

I know that this "feature" is disabled when the PMS owner does not have a PlexPass (like me). Then the watched flag can only be set by the owner and not by any shared friend.

Is there a way to forbid PMS this? Couldn't find anything under the friends sharing options or the library settings.

Thank you very much
CCarpo

Within the last week I have been unable to sync any media to the cloud using CloudSync and Google Drive.

Has a Plex update killed this? I am not seeing anything meaningful in the logs.

The issue first was when I deleted media from the CloudSync (due to Google Drive being at full capacity), it never removed it from Google Drive (after 24+ hours), so I manually removed all the media from Google Drive, Unlinked Google drive and Linked it again. Now it won't upload anything.

I see this in the logs:

Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.245 [0x80a991000] ERROR - CloudSync: Error 404 requesting XML from http://127.0.0.1:32400/sync/xxx/xxx

Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.350 [0x80a999c00] ERROR - LPE: unknown item 32522.
Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.350 [0x80a999c00] ERROR - Sync: failed to generate query for path library://xxx/item/%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F32522 in sync item 20358642
Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.364 [0x80a999c00] ERROR - LPE: unknown item 32961.
Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.364 [0x80a999c00] ERROR - Sync: failed to generate query for path library://xxx/item/%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F32961 in sync item 20358945
Nov 28, 2017 00:01:33.364 [0x80a999c00] WARN - Sync: sync item 20358945 has an empty sync set query, assuming sync item is no longer valid

I recently switched my Plex Media Server from Nvidia Shield Pro 2017 to a dedicated Intel NUC. My media contents are stored on a Synology DiskStation. The reason why I switched was that I had huge troubles to setup a stable Plex Media Server on the Shield. The main problem here is that Plex users are enforced to use the SMB/CIFS protocol for file sharing. In early 2017 the Shield randomly ignored folders on the NAS (there are a lot of forum posts about this topic, for example this one). This problem was solved in mid 2017 but still another very annoying issue remained. My mounted SMB/CIFS drives kind of crashed on the shield randomly with no reason. The only solution to fix this was to reboot the Shield, un-mounting and re-mounting did not help. Recently I had this issue 10 times on a single day, so I decided to kick this device out of my house.

I got positive feedback for my setup from friends, so I decided to share this guide maybe it helps anyone else. Feedback, tips and suggestions are pretty much appreciated!
My work is based on that guide from 2014 but changes some things and adds some more features as for example RAM transcoding. Even if there are that many steps it only took me 30-60 minutes to setup the NUC, so don't worry^^ I wanted this guide to be complete and step by step understandable

HARDWARE

• Intel NUC (BOXNUC7I5BNK, i5-7260U 2,20 GHz, Link)
• 2 x 8GB DDR4 RAM (CT2K8G4SFD8213, Link)
• 250GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Samsung 960 EVO MZ-V6E250BW, Link)

STEP 1: Assemble NUC

• Insert RAM
• Insert M.2 SSD
• Update BIOS with latest from Intel's website

STEP 2: Prepare Ubuntu installation

• Download Ubuntu 16.04 64bit server version as .img file! from releases.ubuntu.com
• Prepare your USB drive with that image
• There's a nice quick guide from OpenELEC that shows how you can do that
• Don't use unetbootin for creating a bootable USB drive as this could lead to some problems during the installation!

As the OpenELEC guys removed the guide I'll give you an example for macOS:

• Open Terminal and navigate to your download folder: cd ~/Downloads
• Print a list of devices: diskutil list
• This will result in something like this:

/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk1
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 UNTITLED                8.0 GB     disk1s1

• Find your USB drive and remember the name (e.g. /dev/disk3). In the following steps replace "x" with your disk number
• Unmount the disk: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskx
• Next we need to zero out the partition map, macOS has an issue if you don't do this: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdiskx bs=1024 count=1
• Write the image to the disk: sudo dd if=ubuntu-16.04.3-server-amd64.img of=/dev/rdiskx bs=4m
• Ensure the changes are synced: sync

STEP 3: Install Ubuntu

• I used the following partitions:

  • #1: 536MB, ESP, bootable (size was suggested by Ubuntu)
  • #2: 64GB, swap (much bigger than usual because of RAM transcoding)
  • #3: 185,5GB, ext4

• During software selection select "standard system utilities" and "OpenSSH server"

• Remove USB drive and reboot your NUC
• Assign your NUC a static IP address in your router's DHCP configuration

STEP 4: Remote connect to your NUC

• All following steps can be done directly on the NUC as well, but from that point on I will only use SSH
• Login from a client
  • ssh <username>@192.168.0.100

STEP 5: Main configuration

• As I had issues with Ubuntu 16.04 and IPv6 I enforce apt to use IPv4

  • echo 'Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99force-ipv4

• Update Ubuntu system

  • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

• Add plex repository as source

  • echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb/ public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list
  • curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -
  • sudo apt-get update

• Install Plex Media Server dependencies

  • sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon avahi-utils

• Install Plex Media Server

  • sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver
  • During installation you will be asked if you want to override the plex repository source with the one from the package. Here you can select "yes".

• Re-enable plex repository as source

  • nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list
  • Uncomment the last line deb https://... by removing the #

STEP 6: SSH configuration

• If you don't connect to your NUC via SSH you can skip this step
• I setup the NUC to only allow SSH access with authorized public keys
• On you client machine close the SSH connection to the NUC and run ssh-copy-id <username>@192.168.0.100. This will copy your public key to the NUC
• Login again on the NUC using SSH. There shouldn't be any password request
• Change SSH configuration: sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PubkeyAuthentication yes
RSAAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys (uncomment this line)
PasswordAuthentication no
Port xxxx (I also use a not-default port for SSH)

• Restart SSH

  • sudo systemctl restart ssh

• If you changed the SSH port you need a different login call from now on

  • ssh <username>@192.168.0.100 -p <port>

STEP 7: Enable autologin

• I read somewhere that Plex Media Server sometimes runs into problems, if there's no user logged in on the machine. In order to prevent that I setup autologin
• sudo mkdir /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d
• sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin <username> tty1

STEP 8: Setup NFS and Autofs

• I use NFS in order to connect to my NAS

• Install dependencies

  • sudo apt-get install autofs nfs-common

• Create mount directory (in my case I replaced nas with the hostname of my NAS in all the following steps, for example in /nas or auto.nas)

  • sudo mkdir /nas

• Configure Autofs

  • sudo nano /etc/auto.master
  • Append the following at the end of the file:

/nas      /etc/auto.nas

• Create Autofs configuration file for your NAS
  • sudo cp /etc/auto.misc /etc/auto.nas
  • Append all your mount points at the end of the file, for example (replace the IP with the IP of your NAS):

movies    -fstype=nfs4    192.168.0.99:/volume1/Movies
music     -fstype=nfs4    192.168.0.99:/volume1/Music

• Restart Autofs

  • sudo systemctl restart autofs

• All you mount points are now available at /nas/...

• Autofs will automatically unmount all mount points if there is no access within 5 minutes and remount if you try to access the mount point. You can keep ghost references to the mount points by adding --ghost in auto.master at the end of the appended line

STEP 9: Configure Plex Media Server

• Open http://192.168.0.100:32400/web in your browser and configure your server

STEP 10: Setup RAM transcoding

• In order to prevent heavy SSD usage (and because of better performance) I setup RAM transcoding for my server. As my RAM is limited to 16GB I setup a RAM disk, so if I reach the limit of my RAM the system will make use of the swap

• Create transcoding directory

  • sudo mkdir /tmp/transcoding

• Setup the system to mount the RAM disk on every boot

  • sudo nano /etc/fstab
  • Append the following line:

tmpfs    /tmp    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,size=64G,mode=1777    0    0

• Grant writing permissions for the transcoding directory

  • sudo chown -R <username>:<username> /tmp/transcoding

• Use /tmp/transcoding in Plex Media Server > Settings > Server > Transcoder > Temporary directory

STEP 11: Schedule reboot

• I schedule a weekly reboot as all machines need a reboot occasionally
• sudo crontab -e
• Append at the end:

# Reboot at 04:00 every sunday
0 4 * * 0 /sbin/reboot

STEP 12: Configure firewall

• Please check out the Plex reference for which ports you need to allow
• sudo ufw reset
• sudo ufw allow <port>/tcp comment 'ssh'
• sudo ufw allow 32400/tcp comment 'plex media server'
• sudo ufw allow 32410/udp comment 'plex gdm network discovery'
• sudo ufw allow 32412/udp comment 'plex gdm network discovery'
• sudo ufw allow 32413/udp comment 'plex gdm network discovery'
• sudo ufw allow 32414/udp comment 'plex gdm network discovery'
• sudo ufw allow 3005/tcp comment 'plex companion'
• sudo ufw allow 111 comment 'nfs'
• sudo ufw allow 2049 comment 'nfs'
• sudo ufw enable

STEP 13: Setup monitoring

• It took me a while to find an "all in one" monitoring solution for CPU, memory, swap, load, network, disk I/O, temperatures and top processes
• I ended up with Glances

• Installation:

  • sudo apt-get install python-pip
  • pip install --upgrade pip
  • pip install glances

• I also created a shortcut for glances in my user directory:

  • mkdir ~/bin
  • echo 'glances --percpu --process-short-name --disable-bold' | tee ~/bin/gtop
  • chmod +x ~/bin/gtop

• Now I just have to run gtop

STEP 14: Configure swap usage

• Swappiness defaults to 60 so I adjusted it a little bit
  • sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=85

CONCLUSION

I did a couple of performance tests and my server did very well. When the Shield crashed (really. it hung up and rebooted) trying to play a 60GB 4K HDR movie my new server just plays it without any delay. CPU load during that was at round about 25-35% (transcoding HVEC to H264). As the CPU supports hardware transcoding for H264 transcoding that also runs totally smooth (CPU load below 10%).
Regarding loudness, the NUC isn't really noisy, I have it in my living room you cannot really hear it.

As I said in the beginning I would be very happy for feedback, tips or suggestions!

Cheers,
grogster