Hoping I might ask for some help here!
I’ve been running PMS on a WDC My Cloud PR2100 for several years with great success. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to migrate my server function to a new M1 Mac mini but keep the media files on the NAS.
I followed the article Move an Install to Another System and it seemed to work well. When I started up PMS on the Mac mini, I saw all my libraries, metadata, playlists - everything. Even my TV tuner information came over with no trouble.
The problem is - I can play any of the items in my libraries stored on the NAS. I edited each library setting on the Mac and “repointed” to the Media folders on the NAS. I could even run a rescan. The NAS is auto-mounted whenever the Mac starts up, so I don’t think file access is the issue.
When I try to play a movie/TV Show, I get an error message “Playback Error - An error occurred loading items to play.”
I’ve even tried creating a new Movie library called “New Movies” with a fresh direction to the media on the NAS. I still get the same error. Since I have no trouble accessing the NAS media in Finder on the Mac, I’m skeptical that Plex is having trouble getting to the media.
When I moved the “Plex Media Server” folder over to the Mac from the NAS, I also moved over the “Preferences.xml” file but did not move or erase the com.plexapp.plexmediaserver.plist file the the Mac PMS install had created.
Is anyone familiar with this issue? I’m pretty good at this stuff but this has me stumped. The whole point of this migration was to get better processing power from the Mac mini without having to recreate all of my metadata and libraries I’ve diligently built over the years.
Make sure you have given PMS permission to access removable/ network drives in the system security & privacy settings
System Settings>Security & Privacy> Privacy tab. On left side scroll down to Files & Folders and Plex Media Server shoudl be there and check the box for network volumes. Or you can use the Full Disk Access options which is above Files & Folders
those these files serve the same function the mac will only read the plist. This will only really affect that it will be treated as a new server rather than it thinking it is the same server that was on your NAS. it should not have any effect on playback
Hey thanks for the quick reply!! As it happens, all those settings were already set to give PMS the required permissions.
And then the darnedest thing happened. When I was having so much trouble I shut down PMS on the Mac for about 10 minutes, with the intention of turning back “on” the PMS on the My Cloud NAS. I wanted to compare (in detail) the settings for each server side by side. When I restarted the Mac PMS, lo and behold - it worked correctly! It was able to access and play all of my media files from the existing NAS volumes.
I have no idea how or why things began to work, but everything appears to be working perfectly now.
(My next step is to play a few simultaneous streams from the NAS PMS, record the data from Dashboard, and compare with identical streams to identical players from the Mac. Oddly, a 1080p H.264 Blu-Ray is coming through via Direct Play on both, but a 720p movie I pulled off TiVo years ago is coming through Direct Stream 720p on the My Cloud but transcoded (HW) down to 480p on the Mac. I’ll do some more testing before I decide whether to send the Mac back within the return window.)
