would anyone please give me a guide on how to set up rclone with Plex on Mac?
I now have rclone working with google drive, I used ‘mount’ command but the copy speed is extremely slow, at ~20-30mb/s while I have gigabit upload. so I assume I’ve had something wrong…
Thanks 
RCLONE for uploading content to GDrive = GOOD
RCLONE for mounting GDrive so Plex can stream from it = BAD, you will get multiple GDrive bans
Take a look at tools like google-ocaml-fuse as a way to mount GDrive
PlexDrive is another good tool, but I think it is only linux currently
@hthighway said:
RCLONE for uploading content to GDrive = GOOD
RCLONE for mounting GDrive so Plex can stream from it = BAD, you will get multiple GDrive bansTake a look at tools like
google-ocaml-fuseas a way to mount GDrive
PlexDrive is another good tool, but I think it is only linux currently
Thanks for reply
Yeah plexDrive is for Linux only unfortunately.
so if rclone is for upload, how do I keep the directories? And how do I let plex to read the files without mounting?
And is google-ocaml-fuse also Linux only?
Thanks again 
@garyleecn said:
And how do I let plex to read the files without mounting?
You have to mount it somehow, I’m just saying using rclone as the mount tool with GDrive will lead to 24hr bans on GDrive.
And is google-ocaml-fuse also Linux only?
Yeah you’re right, I forgot it was linux only too.
@hthighway said:
@garyleecn said:
And how do I let plex to read the files without mounting?
You have to mount it somehow, I’m just saying using rclone as the mount tool with GDrive will lead to 24hr bans on GDrive.And is google-ocaml-fuse also Linux only?
Yeah you’re right, I forgot it was linux only too.
Alright. Thanks anyway
You don’t need to mount your Google Drive to copy files. To achieve maximum speed you also want tweak around with various parameters so a typical command would be something like
rclone copy LOCAL remote: --transfers=8 --verbose
The documentation is very good https://rclone.org/docs/
I think plexdrive has binaries for Mac (plexdrive-darwin-10.6-amd64)
@blim5001 said:
I think plexdrive has binaries for Mac (plexdrive-darwin-10.6-amd64)
ahh… forgive me, I don’t know how to use it unless it’s .dmg or plain application. lol
hmm weird. i now have plex scan two folders, local and cloud (where cloud is a rclone mount). the movies are added to local first, and plex finds them immediately. however, after i use “rclone move” to move files from local folder to cloud folder, plex only detects the files were removed in local, hence delete the movie. plex never automatically scan the cloud folder in this moving process.
however, if i run a manual update on the library, it will find the movies in cloud folder and add them back, also if i just use drag and drop (on mac) to add movies to cloud folder directly (without adding them to local first), plex finds it immediately without any intervention…
anyone have any ideas what’s going on here?
thanks
Plex can “hook” your local file system to get notifications that a file has changed or been updated/added so it knows to scan it. This isn’t the case for remote drives.
So Plex won’t find the files until the scan is triggered.
@cayars said:
Plex can “hook” your local file system to get notifications that a file has changed or been updated/added so it knows to scan it. This isn’t the case for remote drives.So Plex won’t find the files until the scan is triggered.
that I’m aware, that Plex won’t automatically scan a network drive.
however, the rclone mount is not a ‘network drive’, it mounts like a local hard drive (at least the way I understand). that’s why if I move something say from ~/Downloads/ directly into the rclone folder, Plex immediately initiate a scan.
What operating system are you running? If windows it’s a network drive.
@cayars said:
What operating system are you running? If windows it’s a network drive.
I’m running on my Mac.
@garyleecn said:
@cayars said:
What operating system are you running? If windows it’s a network drive.I’m running on my Mac.
OSX/MacOS under the covers is UNIX so there are no network drives as such. When you use rclone to mount the Cloud drive on a local mount point it is to all intents & purposes a local directory.
While it may look and feel like a local drive to you it’s not. It doesn’t act like one either.
It’s not going to support events such as “hey my directory just got updated”. If Plex or any other program can’t listen for events from the operating system and there aren’t any then nothings is going to happen. That’s what you see with your mounted Google Drive.
@cayars said:
While it may look and feel like a local drive to you it’s not. It doesn’t act like one either.
This is contradicted by the earlier comment that
@garyleecn said:
if i just use drag and drop (on mac) to add movies to cloud folder directly (without adding them to local first), plex finds it immediately without any intervention…
@garyleecn have you instead of using rclone move to use rclone copy or sync followed by deleting the local files?
It’s not a contradiction. While it can appear to be a local drive for purposes of copy, delete, move, mkdir, permissions and other similar drive functions, that doesn’t mean it supports all the exact same functions a true local drive would.
It’s not going to support functionality such as notifications. You can’t pull SMART info from it, etc Regardless of how your operating system displays the drive it’s not close to being the same as a local drive as everything is emulated via an API layer.
So it’s not a contradiction in functionality available. Bottom line is without the notifications Plex can’t see that new media was added and will have to find it during some type of normal scan.
Carlo
Kind of a tangent but this is why I can’t wait to get in on the Google File Stream beta. It’ll mount a Google drive like a network drive without storing the data on your hard drive and then I can use cryptomator to encrypt the files.
Drive File Stream won’t help with the notifications we were talking about. Drive File Stream is really nothing more than what you can do already with ExpanDrive, NetDrive or rclone for that matter short of not having to purcahse a 3rd party program.
It’s simply a remote drive without the need to sync with your local computer. You can do this now for free with rclone. You can use rclone to encrypt your data already.
If you’re on Windows then also check out StableBit cloud drive which is very cool. It’s a block based (not file stream) encrypted drive in the cloud with good local caching which works well with Plex. Problem with StableBit is only one computer can mount this drive at a time. Two computers can’t share the drive. Of course you can “share” the drive like any other server drive at home but you can’t have it mounted on your server and then on your notebook at work. Login at work and it takes your Server connection off line. Log back in on the server cloud drive and it knocks your notebook offline. 
The contradiction I was describing was that @garyleecn is that if he does a drag & drop of files to the cloud folder that Plex does pick them up without having to force a scan so evidently Plex is getting a notification. It’s only when he uses rclone move to move files from Local to Cloud that it’s necessary to force a scan.
