I’ve been trying to migrate my PMS over from Windows to a new Intel NUC running Linux. First I tried Manjaro but couldn’t get Plex to run. I was told on the forums that it simply isn’t possible get Plex working on Manjaro - and many have tried. Well, I got busy with other things this week and had wiped my Manjaro install in favor on an Ubuntu derivative due to this. Well, tonight I went to work in installing PMS and found out that it just became available via Snap, which appears to have a lot of benefits (including the fact it seems it would have worked splendidly in Manjaro, had I waited just a few days).
I followed the instructions that I was able to find for installing the Snap PMS however, both instructions had a --beta flag in the terminal instructions. Does this means that it’s only available right now via Snap as a Beta, rather than stable? Would I be able to switch over to the stable channel at some point later? Or is there a way to install from stable now? Also, is it normal for the Snap PMS to default to Port 32401 rather than the standard 32400? Not that it matters, but my new install seems to have chosen 32401 rather than 32400. Just curious if that’s normal.
Any info regarding the above would be great. Thanks for making PMS available via Snap - I’m looking forward to the auto updates, etc! Glad I happened upon the new info rather than installing via the standard method.
Installed the snap on Debian (i3-4130), running it for the last 4 days. Beta version in the beta repository, same version in the edge. If they get decent enough adoption I can see where they would have regular and beta versions staged. Didn’t notice a port change will have to look more closely.
Observations: Stable, memory usage is greatly reduced ~500MB usage when idle. Ran 4 simultaneous Live TV recordings while time-shifting one of them. With 8GB of ram seemed like each program had a 30 minute live buffer. Doing a lot of FF,RW, Pause, with different buffer sizes on the PMP. Best results were the 75 and 150 MB settings, the 10 and 500 would crash the player pretty easily. All the crashes didn’t affect the server or recordings which is a big plus.
Thanks for sharing the link. I should have thought to include it. I’d obviously visited it and it definitely pulls the Beta channel, NOT the Stable. In fact, that’s the site I used to confirm that the Stable channel won’t work (as I’ve seen somewhere either on here or Reddit that someone else had tried and specifically got an error that there is no Snap Stable at this point).
To confirm, go to the link, click on “All Versions”, and the only version available is the Beta. When you click on the install link on that latest/beta version (the only one there), you get the terminal command to install (which is where I got the command to install what I have): sudo snap install plexmediaserver --beta. To confirm again, this does not work without the --beta flag. And this site doesn’t give any additional info about that, or I wouldn’t have had to take the time to post here, which takes much more effort than reading through a link.
Thanks so much for sharing your experience! I really appreciate hearing it.
Just to confirm, can I ask are you saying when you mentioned “Stable” in our reply, are you referring to the fact that your experience with this Beta is that is it running “stable” and is using greatly reduced amounts of RAM compared to the standard install? If so, that’s fantastic news!
Also, can you please elaborate on the 75 and 150mb settings? Where do you set those up? I’ve never messed with it in previous installs and would like to try the 150mb since it sounds like that made the playback more stable. I also have 8gb of RAM at this point and so it would probably work well for my system.
I’ve also (finally) figured out where to install Plug-ins manually, since you cannot place anyfiles into the Snap folder as it’s all read only (I assume due to the auto upgrade capabilities, etc). I’ll share that shortly on the thread that I started asking about it since I’m guessing that’s something that others may be curious about as the Snap gains in users and popularity.
Thanks SO much for sharing your experience! I really, really appreciate it - especially with such little info currently available on the Snap install.
Stable as in I recorded 10 hour long shows 3 and 4 at a time back to back while trying to play from the beginning while recording and jumping around. I crashed the player multiple times but none of the recordings were affected. Seems like some of the things I have been blaming on the server are actually the player’s fault.
So the player is the Windows Plex Media Player, to change the audio,video, buffer settings you have to switch to theater mode and click on you name icon to get to settings. I turn on HW support and de-interlacer, set the audio for stereo and buffer to 150MB . It will make your server work harder but you have the juice for it. I will be turning off Hyper-threading, the Haswell processor has been having difficulty ever since I patched the bios and kernels for Spectre and Meltdown. This is what orignally started me on a odyssey of trying out 10 different linux distros, Docker and other things, trying to solve why my server which had previously worked for 3 years without touching suddenly got all unstable.
