I have PMS running on Raspberry PI 2!

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1041

Two questions regarding outsourcing the “transcoding” folder to an external HDD:

  1. Will the SD Card get damaged when it often needs to transcode?
  2. I can’t set the transcoder folder to my external HDD. It works for very first play after setting it to an external drive but then all movies say “not available” and the HDD acts weird (no access etc).

I thought it might have to do with chmod so i entered “sudo chmod 777 /media/usbdrive/Transcoding” but this did not help at all…

Somewhere i found a tutorial that wanted to change the Plex user but i don’t want to try that out before someone here gives me a “go” for it… maybe there is an even simpler solution to this issue? Thanks! :slight_smile:

1042

@noreason did you add the pi user to the plex group and the plex user to the pi group?

Check the plex log

Looks like you are using automounter, I can’t really help you with that as I don’t use it (for these very reasons)

1043

@blindpet I added my hdd to fstab. Changing Group settings is something I waited to do before you guys say that this is the solution. I guess I will give it a go later :slight_smile:

1044

Post your fstab and the output of ls -lh /media/usbdrive

Usually in fstab your pi user will be the owner of the drive and Plex can’t read it unless it is a member of the pi group

1045

@blindpet
my fstab: UUID=56E4-C1DD /media/usbdrive/ exfat utf8,uid=pi,gid=pi,noatime 0

Output of ls -lh /media/usbdrive: drwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi 128k Mar 13 05:27 Transcoding

I entered “sudo usermod -aG pi plex” and afterwards: “sudo usermod -aG plex pi” as explained in this tutorial: http://www.htpcguides.com/install-plex-media-server-raspberry-pi-3-image/

The first command worked. The output of the second input named “sudo usermod -aG plex pi” is: "usermod group ‘plex’ does not exist.

But as far as i understand, i added user plex to the pi group and it should work now, right?

1046

Update: Nope, not working… so… simply adding plex user to pi group seems to be of no help

1047

@noreason if you see the guide it should say to make the permissions of the folder recursively 775 afterwards, the second 7 means the group that owns the folder can read, write and execute.

If you are still having problems it is likely exfat being silly.

1048

@blindpet Strangely i put it to 777 to be safe and sound but ls -lh shows no difference despite me entering the input as sudo… its a brand new hdd… hope its not faulty

so is the second step (putting pi in plex group (which did not work for me) necessary?)

1049

It is not the hard drive, exfat is not a natively supported file system, you should use ext4.

Apparently there is no plex group (I could have sworn there used to be) so that is an oversight on my part.

1050

@noreason you can also try using facl as outlined here

1051

@blindpet Setting facl gives me an error: “/path/to/file: The operation is not supported” Mh…

1052

Then that is most likely because of exfat @noreason , perhaps if you unmount and try with facl it will work, otherwise switch to ext4

1053

@blindpet What about simply adding umask 0000 to fstab? Shouldn’t this grant everyone rwx on my external hdd? :slight_smile:

1054

002 will give 775 IIRC, very curious if this works, foreign file systems and permissions is a pain :wink:

1055

I even tried umask=0000 so 777. This gets reflected in Terminal as it shows that everyone now has rwx. Still Plex acts the same way. The second i start an (audio)transcode it creates a folder in /media/usbdrive/Transcoding. The second i stop playback it seems it wants to delete everything inside /media/usbdrive/Transcoding but fails and i get the “not available” issue on all movies…

It looks like even with 777 there is no chance for Plex using a transcode folder on the external storage… I guess i leave it on my SD Card then… hopefully it won’t get damaged by all those read/write accesses… :-/

1056

I’ve managed to setup a raspberry pi 3 running minibian and PMS.

Its working fine with music, I haven’t put any videos on there yet though, has anyone seen any reports about whether the pi3 can transcode ok for plex?

1057

@sim667 it will transcode some videos just like the Pi 2 can.

1058

Is there a kind of chart of how capable it is? I guess there is no chance of transcoding 1080p material h.264 down to 720p (4mbit) for mobile phones, right?

1059

If I every find time I will make a chart, the current difficult video I try is Elephant’s Dream XviD 1080p. I would need a list of free videos, codecs and bitrates to do a proper test @noreason everyone is welcome to help create one and I’ll run the tests.

1060

Im trying to ascertain whether I need to transcode all my videos before moving them to the storage for the pi…

Its highly unlikely I’ve got any 1080p vids in there. As this is all stuff I got years ago, before I even had a HD tv… most of it is going to be 480 or worse, with the occasional 720p