Plex and OSX Sleep Mode

@raftingquarrel
yes but thats exactly whats the point. For example: iMac is upstairs and i want to watch a movie on ATV4 downstairs, or even from my iphone over the internet - only works when mac is in permanent on, or beeing manualy waked up and wimoweh is taking over to prevent it from sleeping. If the mac is already sleeping then ATV4 or iPhone is shortly waking it but it starts to sleep again short after. No way to browse or start a movie. And wimoweh is useless in this situation. This is useless for me in terms of energysaving and system sleep. sorry to say so. i dont want to run my mac 24/7 or have to wake it by hand. with the link above it works this way. Sleeping/browsing/streaming-watching a movie/sleeping. It would be wonderful if wimoweh could do this, or even got implemented in PMS.

best regards

@Ekomax I understand exactly what you mean but I think where the confusion lies is that you’re thinking that Wimoweh will solve a different problem to the one it was designed to do. No one has ever claimed that Wimoweh was designed to wake a sleeping Mac, it’s designed to keep a Mac awake when it might otherwise go to sleep.

What you’re looking for is a group of technologies that are generally called Wake on LAN or WOL for short. OS X has supported WOL for years and I use it regularly in exactly the scenario you are describing: to wake my Plex server when it’s being accessed but, to be clear, that’s not what Wimoweh or Wimoweh’s Plex mode was designed to do.

That being said it would be relatively easy to add a button to Wimoweh to wake a remote Macintosh using WOL but I’ve never had that many people looking for that feature to be honest.

@raftingquarrel
That would be a wonderfull thing if you could put this into wimoweh. there are many threads here pointing at this problem. maybe you could solve this.

@Ekomax For waking a sleeping mac, this is something the Plex client should be able to do. I had an issue previously where this stopped working and it was because Plex media Support stopped using Bonjour. The functionality wasn’t removed, it was just no longer active as standard.
Check the advanced server settings config file to see if Bonjour is in there or not. If it isn’t, you can use the defaults command to add it. Once done, restart your Mac and a Plex client should then be able to wake a sleeping Mac. I had to do this and it has worked flawlessly ever since with all my clients (iOS and Samsung TVs). I’m also assuming you also have WOL enabled on your Mac under settings - Energy Saver > Wake for Network Access. Is your iMac on Ethernet or Wireless?

More details at:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201105343-Advanced-Server-Settings

@donka
i will look at this when im home from work. Can you do a step by step guide to enable it?
best regards

Sure, I’ll do a step by step guide when I am back home this evening. It is a simple change.
Quick question, is your iMac (Plex media server) connected wirelessly to the network or by Ethernet cable?

At the moment wireless. but was cable before. cable should not be the problem. imac late 2013 21,5. Waka on network
 enabled.
Thanks for your help

@donka
Enabled Bonjour (link from you above) Further i enabled Wimoweh (Plex, localhost,32400). All on Wifi not cable.
It doesn’t work, iMac wake for short time but then falls to sleep again - does it only work with cable?

Apologies, I didn’t get a chance to check last night so checked this morning instead. So, will the iMac wake on demand now with Plex? The issue is it is not staying awake or are you still having issues with the server waking up?

@ekomax it might be useful to send the output of pmset -g log so we can see what is causing the Mac to sleep. How long does it stay awake for?

Sorry not possible anymore. dont know why but my experiment crashed my imac and so plex.

 nit the nerv to set it up right now.

it just stood awake for about half i minute or so. i browsed the library with my iPhone. selected movie and subtitle and tryed to stream. And then nothing, just spinning wheel.

@ekomax, OK so there’s something not right there. If you’ve followed donka’s notes it should wake remotely and should stay awake. I think we’d need to see some logging to go any further. Let us know when you’ve got some time

ok thanks for your help. will contact you

Also check out your Energy Saver settings on the iMac. Would be good to ensure the Mac sleep isn’t set too aggressively e.g. trying to sleep before you have started movie playback.
This functionality does work so it is worth persevering with.I had a few issues to sort out both with waking the Mac and keeping it awake during playback but got there after some research and it has been rock solid since I did this last year.

just restoring from timecapsule at the moment. had the sleeping settings default. must there be a cable connection to the airport?

Wake On LAN (WOL) typically needs an Ethernet connection (Cable to router) to work although some Wireless combinations will work. If you have an airport then the Mac can be woken wirelessly so should be fine although I would consider connecting with a cable for the purposes of testing just to rule that out.

hi, i have plex media server on my macbook under a vodafone revolution router: it can’t send magic packet in broadcasting mode so app like wake on lan doesn’t work (naturally i have portaforwarding udp port 9 and 7 from router to my mac).

so thank to this post i have a way to keep awake my osx (by script o by Wimoweh) but now i looking for a solution to “wake on wan” (i can’t change my router with one dd-wrt router neither i can’t use my router as a moden with another dd-wrt compatible router).

The only solution i have find is to use AirVPN but i’m discussing this here: https://airvpn.org/topic/19516-wake-on-wan-under-airvpn-connection-possible/

@donka @raftingquarrel
hi you two, sorry for keeping you waiting. Since last time i did a clean install with Sierra and PMS 1.1.4. Activated AFP Sharing on my iMac and via iCloud and on the Airport. Guess what - the Mac wakes up and Wimoweh kept him awake. I didnt need to activate bonjour in the PMS.plist.
I hope this lasts. I will do some testing. For now iOS and ATV4 works.

Good to hear. Fingers crossed it keeps working well for you. :slight_smile:

@donka
just wanted to ask you what your prefs in Wimoweh are. i activated Plex, and put in localhost and the port 34200. Did you do something else?