Have been getting a lot of error messages (2 or more /week) and my family member who comes into it from his Android remotely is having even a worse time with errors. BTW- this is something new over the last 6 months or so.
Am running Server Ver.4.34.3 on my desktop. The comp is relatively new, built it about 12 months ago. New AMD, 16 gigs fast ram, etc. Nice machine. My library is on a synology NAS and the library is, for the most part, M4V files done with handbrake.
Type of errors
“There was an unexpected error during playback.”
“Playback has stopped due to multiple playback errors” That sort of thing.
My son, IT dude, says maybe should have seperate server for Plex. Your thoughts? Would be happy to build one but would need your advice on processor, RAM etc.
Let me know your thoughts/questions. Appreciate your time.
I do not know if it will fix your problems but I believe that servers should never ever have any tasks that are not directly related to their duties as servers.
As far as the hardware I would just say that your server is the heart and brain of your media center and it must be robust enough to get the job done under the most adverse conditions you can imagine.
I generally have, in the past, simply watched for good deals on computers and bought one that meets my needs.
It is always my recommendation that, within reason, you get the best computer you can for your server.
Many people will advise you to get an SSD drive for your server but really all you need is a good, solid and reasonably fast hard drive for hosting your Plex server itself. Plex is not that drive intensive and the only real advantage I have seen from an SSD is improved boot times and a server should only need rebooting very rarely.
Media drives do not need to be anything special as serving video is not drive intensive at all.
Except for support of hardware transcoding the video system is unimportant. I and many/most people I know run their servers headless. I do not think I have ever connected a monitor to my server except for initial setup. I do maintenance and such from my main computer using TightVNC to connect over my LAN.
One more thing servers and the drives attached to them should never sleep or hibernate at all. It saves very little and actually increases the likelihood of failures.
One more time get/build the best you can afford and do not burden it with unrelated tasks.
Last month i built my stepdad a new AMD Ryzen PC. With the bits from his previous build I made a Plex server. Consists of AMD Athlon X2 on a gigabyte motherboard with 4 Gb RAM and a cheap graphics card.
I placed a 3tb hard drive in it and it works fine. All the media is either h264 or h265 mkv files with 2 ROKU Express+ sticks as clients. Runs both sticks at the same time with no problems.
As the previous poster states as long as you match the the files encoding (H265/H264 in my case) with the client’s playback capabilities there should be no problems.
Also if you require subtitles (my old dear does) make sure they are .srt otherwise Plex will max out the processor trying to transcode them.
that is not a server version, that looks like a plex desktop app, so you might be confused about what is doing what.
if you have a synology nas, perhaps the server is actually on the nas itself? and if so, you may need to update it, and/or make sure it is configured for the right media paths and has the correct permissions/access to those paths.
unfortunately, you have not really provided any specific information to help anyone do anything other than guess at what the problem/solution could be.
figure out where the server actually is, what version it is running, reproduce the errors using @ Plex Web, download logs from plex web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs > drop the whole zip file into reply.
go @ Plex Web log in with your plex account if necessary
click settings near the top right
this will put you on plex web settings, which the current version is 4.40.1 (probably what you saw originally)
look further down on the left side, > settings > general > this is the start of the server settings, the current beta version is Plex Media Server 1.20.0.3181, the latest public non-beta release is 1.19.5.3112
if you click the ‘remote access’ section, you can see what your current internal and external ip are, so from here you can see if the local ip is your computer or your nas ip.
further down at the bottom, in the troubleshooting section, you can download the logs
so if you can reproduce your errors, then download the logs and put them in the thread here, then folks here can better help you resolve them.
Very cool. Just showing my poor understanding of how all this works, although I have been using Plex for quite a long time, pretty much since it started. Thanks again for holding my hand on this. I very much appreciate your time on this!
near the top right
