HI All,
So, yeah, the whole idea of putting my stuff in the cloud and having it work EVERYWHERE sounds awesome!
I signed up for the Amazon Drive, uploaded my files, and then tested it out: IT DOES NOT WORK
WHY does it NOT WORK? My files are all in .mp4 format?
They are ALL in the PLEX CLOUD SYNC folder.
Yes, my Plex & Amazon account are linked…
SO - WHY DOES IT NOT WORK? WHY will Amazon Drive only play a video file that’s less than “20 minutes long”?
And what’s up with needing ‘an invite’ for a Beta program?
*I’ve got 3 months to cancel or be charged the $50/$60 per year from Amazon Drive - and I’d like it to work NOW
If anyone’s got any ideas, thanks in advance.
I have the PLEX PASS and it’s pretty awesome - unless my house loses power and my pc turns off.
There’s a reason Plex Cloud is in alpha. I honestly don’t have high hopes for it as I don’t think Plex really gave the concept all the thought it warranted. It’s currently a huge mess and disappointment.
You’re better off sticking to the original Plex vision and running your own Plex server in your home on your hardware.
I tried the “Optimize” button on my Plex folder. OK, not impressed. It simply encodes my files into .mp4 format - (prepare to watch your HDD space suddenly disappear) um, I do that already - and with better encryption (smaller file size) than the Plex Optimizer does.
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
I stream to my Roku. My Roku plays .mp4 files easily. The nicest thing I’ve seen with Plex is that it’ll categorize my files into TV / MOVIE and add the artwork, synopsis, etc.
@TallJohn69 said:
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
There is nothing stopping you from doing this now. Mount Your cloud storage as a local drive and then have your Plex Library look at that mount point
@hthighway said:
@TallJohn69 said:
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
There is nothing stopping you from doing this now. Mount Your cloud storage as a local drive and then have your Plex Library look at that mount point
Tried with expandrive, library scan was incredibly slow. Does it need to download the whole file to scan it?
@KarlDag said:
@hthighway said:
@TallJohn69 said:
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
There is nothing stopping you from doing this now. Mount Your cloud storage as a local drive and then have your Plex Library look at that mount point
Tried with expandrive, library scan was incredibly slow. Does it need to download the whole file to scan it?
What OS are you using?
For Windows I’ve read where netdrive works well but takes a long time for library scans
For linux I use acd-cli to mount ACD, over 30TBs of media takes about 3 days to do an initial scan for me
@hthighway said:
@KarlDag said:
@hthighway said:
@TallJohn69 said:
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
There is nothing stopping you from doing this now. Mount Your cloud storage as a local drive and then have your Plex Library look at that mount point
Tried with expandrive, library scan was incredibly slow. Does it need to download the whole file to scan it?
What OS are you using?
For Windows I’ve read where netdrive works well but takes a long time for library scans
For linux I use acd-cli to mount ACD, over 30TBs of media takes about 3 days to do an initial scan for me
I’m on OSX but I’m open to using bootcamp if a great solution comes up on windows (or Linux, but I don’t know cli). Did it basically stream your 30tb for that initial scan?
Here is how I have this working today at my house:
(If you wanted the server “in the cloud”, you would do the same but just on your VPS or whatever. You could also do this unencrypted of course… )
I use Rclone and created an encrypted remote which points to my Amazon Cloud Drive “EncryptedMediaBackups” folder.
I then used Rclone’s mount feature to mount this on my Ubuntu PMS.
brian@Plex:~$ rclone mount encrypted:TV /mnt/EncryptedACD/TV --allow-other &
brian@Plex:~$ rclone mount encrypted:Movies /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies --allow-other &
brian@Plex:~$ ps -aux | grep rclone brian 8052 2.0 1.8 130108 38036 ? Sl Nov11 219:30 rclone mount encrypted:Movies /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies --allow-other brian 13467 1.1 3.3 243276 67896 ? Sl Nov06 192:02 rclone mount encrypted:TV /mnt/EncryptedACD/TV --allow-other
So then, I select /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies or TV when creating my Plex library.
You have to have a decent internet connection for this to work well (I have gigabit FTTH). Scanning is obviously going to be slower than it is if your storage is on the same switch as your PMS, but it works well enough on my library.
It also plays fine for me. Seeking is not great as I’m sure you can imagine. But for those who really want to store (and possibly encrypt) their content on ACD and play it through their own custom Plex Server, it certainly is feasible today.
Thanks @BrianAz - exactly how I do it also. Nice examples. Do you “optimize” your media on your VPS before encryption and transfer to ACD? I do and I found that it helps.
@wreckedred said:
Thanks @BrianAz - exactly how I do it also. Nice examples. Do you “optimize” your media on your VPS before encryption and transfer to ACD? I do and I found that it helps.
I don’t optimize in this case because I am using it primarily as an offsite backup and I want to keep the original quality (I try to keep Bluray remux mostly) in case my local NAS dies.
I’m lucky enough to have a gigabit fiber connection here at home, so the bandwidth is not much of a concern. I can direct-play full bluray remux from ACD without issue. Prior to my recent internet upgrade though, I was using the Cloud Sync functionality to optimize media and supplement my home connection when sharing media with friends (had only 30mbit up at that point).
@TallJohn69 said:
HI All,
So, yeah, the whole idea of putting my stuff in the cloud and having it work EVERYWHERE sounds awesome!
I signed up for the Amazon Drive, uploaded my files, and then tested it out: IT DOES NOT WORK
WHY does it NOT WORK? My files are all in .mp4 format?
They are ALL in the PLEX CLOUD SYNC folder.
Yes, my Plex & Amazon account are linked…
SO - WHY DOES IT NOT WORK? WHY will Amazon Drive only play a video file that’s less than “20 minutes long”?
And what’s up with needing ‘an invite’ for a Beta program?
*I’ve got 3 months to cancel or be charged the $50/$60 per year from Amazon Drive - and I’d like it to work NOW
If anyone’s got any ideas, thanks in advance.
I have the PLEX PASS and it’s pretty awesome - unless my house loses power and my pc turns off.
I think you are confused as well on this.
Plex Cloud Sync - Allows you to upload your media from your local server to the cloud. You need to have a local server to store your media and then you sync that local media to the cloud provider. Note: you must have the media remain on the local server, if you remove it, it will be removed from Cloud Sync, hence the sync.
Plex Cloud - Currently in Beta, only select people have an invite so far. You can sign up for beta and wait for an invite. This sounds like the option you are looking for. This allows you to have a Plex Server in the cloud without the need of having a local server. Plex will give you a media server that is already configured and you just need to connect your cloud provider to the server.
@BrianAz said:
Here is how I have this working today at my house:(If you wanted the server “in the cloud”, you would do the same but just on your VPS or whatever. You could also do this unencrypted of course… )
I use Rclone and created an encrypted
remotewhich points to my Amazon Cloud Drive “EncryptedMediaBackups” folder.I then used Rclone’s
mountfeature to mount this on my Ubuntu PMS.
brian@Plex:~$ rclone mount encrypted:TV /mnt/EncryptedACD/TV --allow-other &
brian@Plex:~$ rclone mount encrypted:Movies /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies --allow-other &
brian@Plex:~$ ps -aux | grep rclone brian 8052 2.0 1.8 130108 38036 ? Sl Nov11 219:30 rclone mount encrypted:Movies /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies --allow-other brian 13467 1.1 3.3 243276 67896 ? Sl Nov06 192:02 rclone mount encrypted:TV /mnt/EncryptedACD/TV --allow-otherSo then, I select /mnt/EncryptedACD/Movies or TV when creating my Plex library.
You have to have a decent internet connection for this to work well (I have gigabit FTTH). Scanning is obviously going to be slower than it is if your storage is on the same switch as your PMS, but it works well enough on my library.
It also plays fine for me. Seeking is not great as I’m sure you can imagine. But for those who really want to store (and possibly encrypt) their content on ACD and play it through their own custom Plex Server, it certainly is feasible today.
I tried using rclone (rmount), it works super well to mount my acd on my desktop, but when I try to stream from it starting the file takes around 15 seconds… is that the performance you’re getting? I have a 120/20 connection so I’d expect it to be quicker.
@KarlDag said:
I tried using rclone (rmount), it works super well to mount my acd on my desktop, but when I try to stream from it starting the file takes around 15 seconds… is that the performance you’re getting? I have a 120/20 connection so I’d expect it to be quicker.
It generally takes 3-5 seconds to start playing most things.
Are you direct-playing? My setup is all wired, and the player is embedded PMP which has hardware acceleration for most formats. I haven’t experimented much yet with transcoding.
@BrianAz said:
@KarlDag said:
I tried using rclone (rmount), it works super well to mount my acd on my desktop, but when I try to stream from it starting the file takes around 15 seconds… is that the performance you’re getting? I have a 120/20 connection so I’d expect it to be quicker.It generally takes 3-5 seconds to start playing most things.
Are you direct-playing? My setup is all wired, and the player is embedded PMP which has hardware acceleration for most formats. I haven’t experimented much yet with transcoding.
Yeah, I’m using an Nvidia shield.
Edit server and rclone on a Mac Mini .
Not sure what the difference might be then. It’s not perfect for me… a few hiccups now and again, but all in all it works relatively well when I use it. I expect I may encounter more frequent issues if I played from the Encrypted ACD more often.
I intend for this to be my backup in case my NAS dies w/o warning (I run a copy job nightly). Still greatly prefer how responsive things are when I store them here on my wired LAN.
I believe others are running PMS on VPS though and I’d be curious to hear how quickly those start streaming. I’m pretty sure one of my shares is setup like this but I’ll need to verify.
I’ll chime in as well, I use acd-cli instead of rclone to mount and my server is remote to me, housed in a datacenter. It can take 5-10 seconds for the media to begin playing.
(The server is on a 1Gbps connection and my download speed it 300Mbps)
Well I let it build the library and scan it overnight and now it does load in about 5 seconds… Which is longer than local, but acceptable.
Now I’m going to try to set this up with encryption!
@hthighway said:
@TallJohn69 said:
It’d be nice if I could point my Plex Server at say, a hosting site where I already have files encoded into .mp4… just saying.
There is nothing stopping you from doing this now. Mount Your cloud storage as a local drive and then have your Plex Library look at that mount point
yep, that works quite well!
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/251975/hosted-plex-amazon-cloud-drive-dvr-vpn-works#latest
