@plexamp @plex any chances of a dedicated Plex app for photos similar to what you did for music? Perhaps call it Plexographs?

Since I've moved to T-Mobile Home Internet, I've been having a difficult time getting any streaming to work without being relayed, even locally on my network. Has anyone else got this to work successfully?

A user on Reddit asked me how I monitor for outages on my Plex server. Since I no longer have any inclination to use Reddit, I decided to post the answer here and point them to it.

As a prerequisite, I am going to assume that you already have Remote Access setup correctly for your Plex server. If you don’t, that’s a whole other thing that you will need to get working first. However, if you see a green check mark next to Remote Access, and "Fully accessible outside your network" on the Remote Access page for your Plex server, then you should be good to move forward.

Step 0 - Set up Dynamic DNS

First, I recommend getting dynamic DNS (DDNS) setup. This isn't a requirement per se, but it does mean you won't have to redo everything any time your public IP changes.

I personally use https://freedns.afraid.org/, but there are quite a few options for free DDNS services. The idea is that you can tell the service your public IP address and they will assign a DNS host name to it, that is resolvable on the internet. So instead of 123.456.789.012:32400 (not a real IP, just an example) being the way to reach your Plex server on the internet, it could be something like my.domain.fake:23400. The domain name would never change, even if your ISP assigns you a new IP address.

You can either manually update that DNS record when your public IP address changes, or you can use a program to monitor for IP changes and update the record for you automatically. Some routers even have settings built in to update dynamic DNS entries for you. I personally use a program called ddclient https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient running on a RaspberryPi, but there are other options for this. Setting up ddclient is a bit complicated and outside of the scope of this post, so I am not going to go into it.

Step 1 - Create an UptimeRobot account

Go create yourself a free account at https://uptimerobot.com/. They are an uptime/outage monitoring service, and they have a free tier that is suitable for monitoring a single service like this for home use. The main down sides of the free tier are a 5 minute monitoring interval (vs. 1 minute for paid) and limited types of monitoring. However, for this guide, I use port monitoring which is included in the free tier. If you find that you need to monitor more types of things, or you need the shorter interval, the next tier up is priced pretty reasonably IMO, so support them and pay for it. I am not an affiliate; I just think they have a good service at a reasonable price.

Step 2 - Setup alert contacts

You need to set up how you will get notified when there is an outage. Go to the settings of your account and click the "Add Alert Contact" button. There are a lot of options, but I personally just use plain old email, as well as a push notification on my phone (you must install the UptimeRobot app on your phone for that). There are a lot of other options like Slack, Discord, etc. but I have never used any of them, so I won’t comment on them.

Step 3 - Setup a monitor for your Plex server

In the UptimeRobot dashboard, click the "Add New Monitor" button. Set the following options:

• Friendly name: Plex server (or whatever you want)
• IP (or URL or Host): If you didn’t setup dynamic DNS just use the public IP address where your Plex server is hosted. If you aren’t sure what it is, you can find it on the Remote Access page of your Plex server settings. However, if you did setup dynamic DNS, put in the host name that maps to your IP instead.
• Port: Custom and then put in the public port that your Plex server uses. Default is 32400, but again you can find this on the Remote Access page of your Pleas server settings.
• Monitoring Interval: This is how often UptimeRobot will check to see if it can reach your Plex server. The lowest you can go on the free tier is 5 minutes. With a paid account you can go as low as 1 minute.
• Monitor Timeout: This is how long UptimeRobot will wait for a response before it decides that no one is going to answer and the Plex server isn’t just being slow but is in fact down. The default of 30 seconds hasn’t been an issue for me.
• Select "Alert Contacts to Notify": select whatever ones you setup in step 2 above.

Click "Create Monitor" and you’re done! In your dashboard there is a button to test a notification if you need to.

Bonus tip: if you know that you are going to be bringing your Plex server down for maintenance, you can pause the monitor before you do. That way you don’t get spammed with a bunch of notifications that your server is down when you already knew about it. Just don’t forget to un-pause the monitor when you’re done. 😊

I have found this setup to be very reliable and helpful for letting me know when there is an issue with accessing my Plex Server. I hope others find it useful as well!

So, I add my TV shows to plex. It scans them and downloads meta data correctly and displays everything in my library. Titles are correct and they play. But as soon as it's done fetching everything it goes through one by one and removes them all from my library. I'm at a loss.

I’m looking for a tablet that I can buy for my kids, so they can watch Plex (connected via a hot spot to my phone) while we’re on long drives.

I don’t need any bells and whistles, nor anything hugely expensive, as they won’t be using them that often.

Does anybody have any suggestions? I was thinking of fire tablets but I’m not sure how well Plex would run.

Plex laid off 37 people on Monday, a figure that represents more than 20 percent of the company’s staff, according to a Slack message from CEO Keith Valory obtained by The Verge. The layoffs affect “every department,” Valory wrote.

Thirty-seven people were cut, and the layoffs affect every department at the company, according to a memo from the CEO.

With the subreddit restricted last time I check I can’t load the topics I want, asking the hive mind what insight them have to identify problematic media that won’t play properly but automatically across all my movie and TV show libraries.

Ideally a windows or Linux based application that I can just feed my libraries into and it spits out what didn’t work properly.

Not looking to identify media that is direct play vs transcode, but media that simply doesn’t work.

I know that it is possible to add users to your Plex home, but its not an ideal option for many. I feel that I have supported Plex and the users that I personally paid for Plex Pass for are not able to use it.

It isn't a reasonable expectation for any of my users to spend 50% the price of Spotify for my limited music library.

Not sure the best place to ask this.

I have a DS420J 4 bay NAS, primarily used for my Plex server and data backups (among a few other things). I currently have 8x6x6 TB Iron Wolf NAS drives in a single volume with SRH and an extra 1 TB SSD JBOD. I have my Plex app and metadata stored on the SSD due to the increased performance I have seen vs. having it installed on the large pool (7200 RPM cap). I am sitting at about 85% used storage of my available 10.8 TB on the primary volume. As such, I am pre-planning my next storage upgrade and am curious about my options while staying with the current hardware. The future plan will be a NAS upgrade, but this little beast has been chugging along so perfectly I want to push it as far as I can.

If I was to remove the 1 TB drive and replace it with another 8 TB Iron Wolf, I would jump to 20 TB available storage. https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?hdds=6%20TB%7C6%20TB%7C8%20TB%7C8%20TB This increase would last me for quite some time ahead of a full NAS upgrade with more bays. In order to do this, I would obviously need to remove the 1 TB SSD to be replaced by the new drive. I have na external enclosure for this drive that can connect over USB to the NAS.

My question: I am finding somewhat conflicting information on how external drives are intended to be used/what their capabilities are when connected to the USB 3.2 port. It seems the intended functionality for backups (which makes sense). Am I able to utilize a USB connected drive and have it function in a similar manner to it being internal? Are you able to install apps from the Package Center to an external drive? Create volumes? I assume there will be some performance degradation due to the translation from SATA to USB, then back to SATA, but I anticipate the SSD will still perform better than adding the app back to the main pool. I just don’t know if I am potentially missing something with my evaluation. Those that have more experience with USB connected drive with their NAS, I would love to hear your experience. Thanks!

I recent got a new chromecast 4K. I’ve installed the plex app and tried playing a movie I have that is 1080p, 12.2Mbs, and it is was horribly pixelated, like it was too low bitrate. It was set to direct play.

I tried the same movie on my Sony android tv and it was crystal clear.

It’s not buffering at all and is direct playing, so it’s not a bandwidth issue. Any idea what the issue could be or how I can debug this?

The movie was sin city and has a lot of black and white so the pixelation is very noticeable

I run a Plex instance on a VPS with limited storage and recently the metadata folder has started spiralling out of control. I’d like to run a jpg optimiser on the artist pics, album cover art, movie posters etc. Unfortunately metadata is stored in an opaque .bundle format. Does anyone have any experience with this format and how to get to its contents?

Is there a way to automatically create a playlist of more than 2 shows in broadcast order.

For instance, shows like Stargate (or I think Arrow/Flash/Supergirl) have alternating episodes. I really don't want to do it by hand; my Stargate playlist will have over 300 items.

Has anyone had issues adding the AMSA agent to plex? I need help figuring out why it won't let me add it.

I went to ~/Library/Application Support/PMS/Plugins and added the AMSA.bundle but it doesn't let me select it when setting up a new library in plex

I get what it’s going for - but I don’t want my own media trying to push me to watch more before I’m done with the current film (aka credits). Feels like I’m not in control which is the entire point of hosting my own server for 10yrs.

Does anyone have any advice on a nuc that would be good to run a Plex server for mostly direct 4k streams locally? I have an older pc I could use but I was wondering if it made sense to run a lower power device as my old gaming pc would probably be overkill.

Mixing Movies and TV: Stargate started with a feature film. Then a bunch of TV shows. Then some of the TV shows had TV movies.

At the moment I've just named the TV movies seasons 11, 12, 13. This fixes that specific instance, but doesn't allow me to put the feature film first (naming something season 0 creates a specials season). What about the X-Files? Seasons 1-5, movie, 6-8, movie. How would you fit that in to one section?

Documentaries: I've got a bunch of stuff. Some are traditional cinema movies, some are series, some are mini-series, some are TV shows. How can I have one library called "Documentaries"?

Collections: Collections are great. Can I keep them separate to the movies/TV? I don't think I want them in with the movies themselves. Can I mix and match movies and TV in a collection?

Concurrent Series: Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis overlapped seasons 8-10/1-3. Can I make a watch order collection? Have them in the broadcast order in one list? Including the movies?

Thank you. Plex is great.

Version 1.32.4.7195

New

• (Web) Updated to 4.108.0

Fixes

• (Analysis) Processing an invalid audio file could result in the scanner stalling while producing very large amounts of log data (#14335)
• (Bandwidth) Very low WAN bandwidth streams could get starved (#14319)
• (Collections) Refreshing item counts for smart collections could block other operations during startup (#14327)
• (Library) Advanced Filter for Editions returning unexpected results (#14106)
• (Library) Items with EPG data could sometimes lose certain metadata fields (#14303)
• (Transcoder) Hardware transcoding could fail to be used on older Intel GPUs on Linux (#14338)

DOWNLOAD LINK

BETA - Version 1.32.5.7210

New

• (Music) Add "Deep Cuts" station.
• (Transcoder) Hardware transcoding is now supported for SDR media on AMD GPUs on Linux (#14332)
• (Transcoder) Hardware transcoding is now supported when running Plex Media Server on headless Windows systems (#14332)
• (Transcoder) The GPU used for transcoding can now be selected in server preferences (#14332)

Fixes

• (Filters) Date-based filters could be off by a day in some time zones (#14342)
• (Library) Poster previews in metadata edit screen could become blank if the selected poster failed to download (#14360)
• (Music) In some cases, less popular tracks were picked in stations.
• (Photos) The server could exit unexpectedly when reading TIFF or RAW image files (#10924)
• (Scanner) Movies and TV shows would fail to match when invoked from the scanner CLI (#14386)
• (Transcoder) Hardware transcoding could fail on Intel Apollo Lake GPUs (#14359)
• (Packaging) RPM packages are now signed using SHA-512 instead of SHA-1 (#14369).

DOWNLOAD LINK

When did they make this a feature? My son watched a movie this morning and I got a notification asking how it was and to rate the movie.

I really want to get started.

I have a big library of files on a HDD. I will run it off my home computer, and it will be exclusively for my home network.

Question 1: Is it fine to run my desktop computer as a server and a client? I don't actually know how Plex works yet, so I may be describing it wrong. Currently I watch things on my Desktop Computer. I want to continue this but through Plex instead of just using VLC. If I do add more clients, only one will be viewing at a time. I do have a Raspberry Pi available, but was hoping to use it as a client at a later time instead of a server,

Question 2: Can I scan my media folder in Plex to get started, and then later rescan my Plex library after I rename files? I haven't reorganised all my files yet, a lot of them should be fine but I don't have time to do it all now. Some of them I may never bother renaming or reorganising. I don't mind Plex having to do all the posters and stuff again.

Question 3: What does Plex do for the re-encoding? I think I read that Plex encodes the video files. Does this create new files on the HHD? My drive is pretty full. I don't have enough space for duplicates in another codec. Does this process replace the files? Will I have to have my Plex drive only contain converted videos? Is there a process to encode from my storage drive to my Plex drive without disturbing my storgate drive? Space is at a premium and I don't want to risk Plex altering my media on my storage drive.

Thank you.

Hey, c/Plex!

This is the first of a weekly series of Plex Advice threads for novices and pros alike to ask questions, give advice, troubleshoot, and share knowledge and resources! Please be polite and helpful to beginners just getting started out, and we want to be as welcoming as we can to newcomers to this community.

Anyone who posts good starter guides, FAQs, and/or wikis may get their links added to the sidebar so the rest of the community can benefit!

Cheers!

edit: apologies for the late post!

Any reason I shouldn't upgrade to it?