Kind of over it at this point

General Discussions
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Realizing today that there are so so many problems with this on my end, I don’t really know where to start, or why I continue to pay for it.

I have the Plex server that ‘runs’ on a Mac Mini (late 2012) updated to Catalina 10.15.7.
Plex starts automatically when the computer is booted. That computer is usually always on, unless there is something I’m doing or a power outage or the like.

Most of the time when I pull up the screen for the server, Plex isn’t running anymore. I reboot and it runs as long as it chooses to do so.

-I try to use Plex when we travel, so I have access to my media. The process usually goes as such before we depart: power everything down, restart internet (Xfinity X1), restart Eero, restart server, restart HD Homerun. That usually helps to increase our chances of it working for a length of time. We’re actually easily satisfied, so when it works for a whole movie or episode before it goes out, no big deal. In all of the years of our relationship with this software, it worked flawlessly once. Just once. Pretty awesome, but never again to be repeated.

So beyond that, I cannot stream or access any channel with the Xfinity cablecard through Plex currently. I can establish that the card is working through the HD Home run app and interface. Plex has an updated guide, and will show what is being broadcast (it spends most of its time updating the guide) on Plex, but anything you select comes back at you with a “Playback Error”. Trying on iOS, Apple TV, Xbox One, Firestick, Chrome, Safari… all of the things. There is also a monthly cost for the cablecard, which we got just for the Plex server.

So here is where it gets even more fun. With the HD Homerun, and a Plex Pass, you have the ability to use your Plex as a DVR to record live broadcasts of TV or Movies. Ironically that worked well for a while. Selected airings would record, even though you couldn’t watch them as they happened. Then I noticed that space was quickly filling up on the drive. I looked a bit and noticed that the server was ‘stacking’ copies of the same episode. Folder structure is set based on the guides, but basically I’d have my recordings as something like this:

The Office (US) - s01e01
The Office (US) - s01e01 copy
The Office (US) - s01e01 copy 1
The Office (US) - s01e01 copy 2
The Office (US) - s01e01 copy 3

You get it… Oh, and the metadata to support each entry is then downloaded and crammed into the folders based on the title of the file. So you have not only multiple copies of each video, but supporting files associated for each as well. Yay :slight_smile:

Or I could have The Alfred Hitchcock Hour season 1 and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour season 01 or The Alfred Hitchcock Hour season 2021 all with the same duplicate stuff. Keep in mind this is the way the system is recording and saving these titles.

The Tidal integration?
Yah, I’ve been trying to listen, and I think it’d be cool, but I get no more than a few seconds of Tidal’s music with my HiFi subscription. ((The Joel Plaskett Emergency album Ashtray Rock has been in the process of ‘adding music’ to the server for about a year now and the album is really not that big.)) I’ve logged out and in, in and out, linked, synced and all of the tips and tricks, but if you want to hear some music from Tidal, it’s only going to be the very first part of that song. And the next song. And the next.

I know there’s the option of starting it all over with a reinstall, but considering I’ve done that 3 times over the years my inclination has waned. All the album art/cover art and time curating things to your liking gets cumbersome with a library of any size… And there’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way for any length of time either.

I’ll refrain from commenting on the usage on the endpoint applications as the server needs to work primarily.

If you got this far thanks.
Love the idea and where Plex wants to be, but I cannot tell you it’s easy, or comes without hiccups. Or works at all or when you want it to.

Sheesh, the free version would give me exactly everything I am currently being able to access with nothing that I am paying for. I consistently only have access to the baked in web stuff anytime/every time I open the service. Terabytes and terabytes on a drive it was built with, and it won’t let you get to any of them… Except that one time I mentioned earlier above.

Kind of a rant, but I feel better.

Have fun everybody.
Good luck!

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I’m not denying your experiences but there’s nothing inherently, broadly, fundamentally wrong with Plex for everyone; lots of people run it with success. In my trials I had good experiences on Linux, Windows, and the Shield. Though to be fair, the Shield server was an absolute mess for a while when first tried it years ago. Updates eventually made it quite well behaved.

I don’t know why it didn’t work for you, but that would be super frustrating.

If you have access to some older PC hardware, and if you aren’t totally fed up, I recommend spinning up a Linux server.

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I’m not sure if you’re asking for help, or just offloading, but I’m gonna give you my 2 pennies worth anyway…

I will be honest and tell you my PMS server is an 8 year old machine, although it is an 8 year old commercial grade HP Server, with a ton of RAM, a pair of SSD’s and dual Xeon processors.

However trying to run an app like PMS on a 10 year old computer is likely to be part of the problem, if not most of the problem.

There comes a time when if you are even vaguely serious about Plex, you might actually need to invest in some reasonable hardware.

Now I know that budget can be an issue for people, and that’s fair enough, but running PMS on a 10 year old Mini computer is just asking for trouble.

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Thank you for the reply.

I may consider that as the linux community has stepped up overall with the recent distros and flatpack and the like. I like Plex for all of the things, but I do want to be able to use them… You understand.

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And thank you too, you make a good point with the age of the hardware.

And it is only a 2.5GHz Dual-Core i5 with 16 GB of RAM which isn’t much nowadays I guess.

I guess ‘serious’ is maybe something to look at. I am serious in having my stuff available, but I am also the only one who uses it, so I wouldn’t need processing for multiple streams or transcoding sessions and the like.

I’m curious though, wouldn’t you think that the program (PMS) should run regardless of the machine I have (considering it is running the current operating system supported)? We aren’t even chatting about quality of video streams or speed of the interface or anything. It loads, works for a little bit of random time (minute(s), hours, days) and then gives up the ghost at it’s own choosing.

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One of the things I learnt early on in IT, is that a product will only “so” well based on the environment it is running on.

If PMS runs for a while, then seems to quit or crash, then it is likely that there is something wrong with the environment, being the host computer.

Indeed I’d agree that you don’t need a ton of computing power, but something more modern certainly should be more reliable.

Also, indeed we haven’t got into quality of stream and the various other details, however I would hazard a guess that your Mac mini may not handle transcoding very well.

If it were you, I’d stop bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out why it’s not running well, and admit to myself that running a product like PMS on a 10 year old mini computer just ain’t gonna cut it any more.

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Strong points, for sure.

I’m just grumpy over here…
Thanks for chatting on the topic, I appreciate it.

BanzaiInstitute mentioned linux…
Maybe I throw a linux partition on there and really start banging my head against some things. :slight_smile:

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Lol… No worries.

Linux might be a bit of fun, but not so sure it’ll balance out for the age of the machine.

Anyways, good luck mate :smiley:

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There’s no reason why it shouldn’t run on that Mac…. But since you have ample evidence that it doesn’t, I just reckon it’s time to try something else. Whatever should happen, sometimes you find a computer with a bad attitude!

You don’t need a powerful server, particularly if you don’t do transcoding. But if you are putting together new hardware, I think it is prudent to make sure it can transcode/tone map at least one stream. It doesn’t cost much and it frees you to play anything on any device on any network. That’s handy.

So, while you can run PMS on a toaster, I don’t think it’s usually the best idea.

If you can find an Intel system, gen 6 or better, with a GPU in the CPU… even a Celeron CPU… that’s a great cheap server because Quick Sync in the GPU gives you hardware accelerated transcoding. The HP 290 and HP s01 are good examples of cheap boxes, but of course I’d pop in an SSD. If you are like me you may have buddies with similar hardware unused in a closet. That’s where my i3-7100 server came from

For the OS I recommend Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It is kind of Plex’s home on Linux, and it is super easy to look up how-tos because of the huge community. (If you know enough about Linux to prefer another distro, sure, go for it.)

I have plenty of gripes about Plex too, believe me. But since you clearly have an interest in making it work I don’t think you should give up yet. Once it’s running properly you can find new reasons to hate it. :wink:

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I did not have much luck when I was using an old Windows PC for my plex server and almost gave up. At that time I was running Unraid for my NAS and they did a major update where they now supported docker and VMs. So I upgraded all my hardware to run the new version. I have been running Plex in a docker container for several years now. I run about 15 different containers and a Windows 10 VM on my Unraid Server. The Windows 10VM is used for my Ceton cable card and some support software to get the channels in to plex.

My server consists of the following:
B450 TOMAHAWK Mother board
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core @ 3200 MHz CPU
24 Gig DDR4 RAM
Unraid 6.9.2 Stable

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“And it is only a 2.5GHz Dual-Core i5 with 16 GB of RAM which isn’t much nowadays I guess”

I’m running mine on a raspberry pi with 4 gigs of ram, so I doubt it’s the power of your machine.

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I recently upgraded from a 2014 Mac Mini with 4GB of ram. Plex would regularly fall over, but I used the machine for other things and couldn’t stomach rebuilding it. if you have the time, I’d recommend rebuilding your OS from scratch. You may find that solves your problem.

13

Thanks everybody, I appreciate you each chiming in.

This one did crack me up:

“So, while you can run PMS on a toaster, I don’t think it’s usually the best idea.”

I’m planning on digging through it soon and hope to report back with positive results.

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My main Plex server is quad core CPU, 16 GB RAM, 1TB OS drive, 2x8TB data drives, 1 GB net card. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 TLS. The 2 data drives store movies & tv shows. Also have a HDHomeRun with 2 tuners, we can watch OTA on any TV in the house. This PC is over 10 years old, it runs 24/7, streams to 4 Rokus ethernet wired, connected to 1080p TVs. It just works, no problems. Another installation is a RPi w/ 4 GB RAM, 2x512GB USB drives for movies & tv shows. It runs Raspian OS. Its up 24/7 with no problems. Ubuntu Linux & PMS seem like a fantastic combo in my eyes.

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The idea that you need powerful hardware to run a basic media server is complete nonsense. Mine runs on a nearly 8 year old i5 w/ 16gb of DDR3 RAM, SSD for the OS, and HDD for storage. It’s running Plex, Emby, several docker containers, and still has plenty of resources. Granted I’m sure I can’t transcode more than a couple of streams at once at best, but I can direct stream several at a time with no issues. I’ve also heard of plenty of people running servers on much less.

Before spending a bunch of money on new hardware, have you tried testing something like Emby or Jellyfin? That would at least give you a better idea if the issue is actually something to do with your OS or hardware, or if it’s Plex’s software.

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Over it? Honestly, my biggest annoyance is not with my ancient hardware, but with Plex’s constant need to “improve” the software experience and add features that I don’t need or want. There is nothing in the Premium features I can see myself ever using. Ergo, no $$$ from me. Drag+drop to manage collections, now THAT would be worth a few bucks.

I am running PMS on a very old Dell Latitude laptop, as a simple home media centre for playback of my mkv and mp4 video files and music (no PVR) and also serving two family members living in other cities near to colleges, with 1080p playback.

It’s hardly state-of-the-art. I upgraded this 2012 behemoth to 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD for its OS, with four 12TB HDD connected by USB (!!!) as the storage. (Two are backups). The music is on a 256GB SD card since the laptop has a built-in slot reader.

I have been running it on Linux Mint since 2018 and have no complaints at all about it, but I do suffer through periodic hiccups of the ISP’s modem.

I recognize that this is not as exotic as some peoples’ needs but I throw my support fully behind re-using old hardware with a cleaner OS (Linux) that requires rebooting only every 3-4 weeks to clean up cache glitches.

I have invested my money in NAS grade HDD, rather than yet another electricity-sucking box to be the server. I thought about using a Pi but… the laptop comes with a screen and kb :slight_smile:

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Nah. Plex runs fine on my old Mac. Something else is the problem.

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Well… I removed Plex from darn near everything in the house, ran a variety of things to make sure we were clean “clean”, did a system update that came through, ran onyx just because, and gave it some time to settle in.

I threw the server software back on and populated my music, tv shows and movies and let it index and build up the libraries. I checked it out of curiosity last night on the phone’s reinstalled app and things looked good. I think all of it was there and accessible… So I tried it on the xbox one (note that anyone with an older xbox will be able to share their experiences using Plex on the xbox) and it fired right up without any hiccups at all. Wow! That’s new!!!
I then went to the ATV and same thing. Pretty rad.

I have yet to link the variety of other folders/collections I have, but we look good so far.
-My tidal account was already linked and actually worked. Imagine my surprise.

Next, I’m intending to load in the Homerun HD and see what happens.

Thanks for the commentary to each of you as this was me blowing off some steam…

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Load in HDHomerun to where?

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I assume adding the HDHomeRun to Plex in the DVR setup, to get Plex to add in guide data and to start allowing recordings/live-TV viewing.

I’m curious about the Office copies the OP had. Seems strange to me that it was making copies like that (recordings). Were you using Sonarr or any of the other library management addons I hear about? Or any post-recording transcode scripts? Either of those could mess with the placement of episodes, appending “copy” and “copy 1” to the end of files, instead of the server itself.

Also, metadata for episodes are never included in the folder with the media itself. I’m sensitive to anyone messing with the structure/files in my media drive, so I’d have noticed if Plex - even with the DVR - added any metadata files (posters, subs, etc). I’m curious what might be adding those files, and if whatever is doing that might be responsible for the copies of the show?

I understand that the point may now be moot, since you appear to have done a total restart of Plex. But then again, if it was a third party addon that managed your library/media drive contents, it might still happen… :thinking: