After suffering a hardware failure, I had to build a new FreeNAS system to store my media (fortunately, I had a recent backup of my files). I built a system with a Ryzen 1700x processor, 16GB of RAM, and some new hard drives, but the metadata won’t seem to download. I’ve looked through some of the forum posts and found suggestions such as disabling IPv6 (I’m not using it), refreshing the metadata (I have), pinging some of the agent sites, such as Last.FM from the console (I have - I can reach it), but nothing seems to work. It worked fine with my old FreeNAS server build, and I’ve been sticking with the supported naming convention for my files.
I’m also having a problem with video files not playing through the Plex web interface. It just sits there with the spinning circle as though it is continuously loading. I did get it to play something briefly last night when cleaning up all of my old authorized devices. It suddenly kicked in and started playing the movie I was trying to test things with. Haven’t been able to get it to work again since. Music files play fine.
@afbergner I think I might have the same problem. I did a fresh install of freenas 11.2. I had been using 11.1. I imported my zfs volume with all of my media. I installed plex and added my libraries. It can find the media and get some info just from the naming scheme but I can’t get any metadata. Just like you, I can play music but have trouble playing videos.
I think I may do the same. I’m kind of disappointing that it has that kind of issue with FreeNAS. I know GPU accelerated transcoding is not possible with FreeNAS and I pay for plex pass which allows that feature so I guess there’s another reason for switching to windows.
I do miss the light footprint of FreeNAS, and I do notice that file transfers from my PC to my Plex box are noticeably slower under Windows (I’m using Storage Spaces for my data drives as opposed to RAID-Z), even with more current hardware (went from an AMD FX processor to a Ryzen 7). That said, I do notice transcoding times are faster (I have an old GeForce card in the Plex box) and Plex updates are more readily available.
Oh I’m actually going to move my media to a raid 1 on my Windows PC. I’m not going to make a separate Windows set up just to run a Plex server. So I won’t have to worry about transfer speeds over the SMB share between my Windows PC and another computer and I’ll have better transcode speeds like you said.
