As you may have recently seen in some of our other Plex Media Server-related forum topics, we’ve been working hard for several months to update and modernize the tools we use to build Plex Media Server. We’ll be publishing some more behind-the-scenes details soon, but the quick take is that our new tools allow us to provide server releases with better performance and set us up for the future to allow our developers to use new features and technologies and to provide better, faster, and more stable releases.
These changes are part of Plex Media Server version 1.15 and newer, which are currently available as beta builds, but will be released as regular public builds soon.
One consequence of the modernization is that there have been some changes in some of the minimum requirements for system libraries. In this case, we require a “newer” version of the Glibc library. Specifically, we require at least Glibc 2.14.1 and we say “newer” in quotes because that version is actually 10 years old itself, so we feel that this requirement is reasonable, in order to bring all the positive changes to the product.
What this means in practice is that the following platforms are no longer supported, starting with Plex Media Server version 1.15.0:
- CentOS 6.x (you can update to CentOS 7 to maintain compatibility)
- QNAP devices running versions of QTS older than 4.3.4 (which includes QNAP devices with 32-bit processors)
Additionally, packages for Thecus NAS models won’t be available until Thecus releases a new, compatible firmware for their devices.
What can you do?
If you’re already running QTS 4.3.4 or newer, you’re all set. Otherwise, you can update your QNAP firmware, if an update is available.
If no update to QTS 4.3.4 or newer is available for your device, then you will not be able to run newer versions of Plex Media Server, very sorry. You can still run the server on another device such as a computer or NVIDIA SHIELD and point to content stored on the NAS.
Deprecation of platforms is something we don’t do lightly and we make efforts to avoid it whenever we can, but sometimes it’s simply not practical to be able to maintain compatibility with very old platforms.
More info on deprecated platforms for Plex Media Server:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/platforms-no-longer-supported-by-plex-media-server/
