Let me give you a quick picture of what I am doing. I am a photographer and have been for almost 60+ years having gotten my first camera from a Ben Franklin store when I counted closest to the number of marbles in a huge pickle jar. I was a photographer in the Air Force and have a history degree. Over the past 5-6 years during the worst times of the COVID pandemic, I spent my time collecting and scanning thousands of my own pictures, negatives, slides converting them into digital images. It was during this time that I became interested in Plex. I wanted to have a place where I could organize all of these images & videos and have access to them no matter where I was. Because, of my history background, I also gathered very old pictures that related to our family. Currently, I have amassed over 1/4 million images/videos. I have arranged into categories at the highest level of the Plex Base. These levels represent the basic split of our entire two-sided family. The main category that I most often display and add to is one that represents just myself and my wife. It is arranged by year at the second level. Under each year, I have created folders by month and under each month another level has been created by day. That is not to say that all of the earlier years could be precisely identified by month and most assuredly not by day except in cases where they were easily placed (ie. valentines day, Christmas, etc). So, you can see that my structure has extended levels below them. When we decide to look at pictures, we would click on a category (say my wife & me). Then we would choose a year and click on it (say 2024). Then we could select a month and click on it (say August). And then finally click on a Day (say the 1st). This would bring us to whatever was happening on that day with thumbnails of the images/videos. So, the finally step would be to click on the first thumbnail or select one from the batch of thumbnails to display full screen. Most times we would start at the first one and scroll through them. I refer to this whole process as drilling down through the levels.
So now you have a idea of how I have my Plex Media Servers set up and how I use it by drilling down through all of this to get to the final level that contains the actual images/videos.
Now, I have three Plex Media Servers working on my network. Two of these are on Synology NAS systems (DS1618+ and DS1817). Both of these systems have 30-40 TB capacity with a large amount of free space on each. I also added a new Plex Media Server to my year old Mac Studio. This Mac is my primary growth server for all images/videos and has near 70TB of storage utilizing mostly PCIe SSD storage devices (most of them raided). These have average read/write speeds of 2000-2700 MB/s.
At this point and before I go any further, I would like to express my concern that maybe I have over-powered your Plex Media Server due to how I have organized all of what I have. If this is why things are not working for me than I would be somewhat disappointed and would have to rethink how I use your product. So, please confirm that you product can handle what I have described.
And finally, I want to express my opinion of these issues. I believe that all of these issues my be related more to the Plex Player apps and NOT the Plex Media Server app. The reason for this opinion will be pointed out below.
BTW - my Plex apps are up to date as well as OS
Now onto the issues.
Let’s start with my Mac Studio. About a month or 2-3 months ago, I started to get this error displayed when I tried to view anything on this Mac. I tried several different ways to view images/videos. Using the Plex Player app, then running the Plex Media Server app, then trying to initiate it from the Web by logging into your site and clicking on “Open Plex”. In ALL of these cases, I was presented with this message. I opened up support through the forum and found that several others were having the same issues. One person expressed a work-around (CMD-R) which required logging in again after pressing CMD-R. This worked and is still working. After the CMD-R, I am returned to where I left off at the new level. Then drilling down into the next level would bring up the same message. So I would repeat this action as many times until I was actually at the final level that showed the thumbnails for the images/videos that I wished to view. Then upon displaying the images or watching the videos, I would back out to the level of the thumbnails, but would NOT be able to back out any further. It was frozen at that level.
Now, let me jump to another Mac. This Mac is a 2010 Mac Pro and I use it for my computing business. It has a Plex Player app on it. Here is the rub. Until yesterday this Mac could enter any one of my Plex Media Servers environments and easily drill down all the way to the actual images/videos with NO PROBLEM AT ALL. I say “Until yesterday” because, yesterday when I went to run the Plex Player app on that Mac, it automatically updated the software for the Plex Player and then when I tried to run it, it told me that this version needed to have a higher Mac OS version than what was on this Mac. This Mac has reached it highest obtainable OS at High Sierra and cannot be updated any further.
Two other Macs have similar issues with the OS stalled at its level. But they ALL worked until the Plex Player app was updated.
Back to the Mac Studio. I will gather the logs for it and send them after I have completed this.
Now, let’s move on to the player on my PCs. At some point, these Plex Players started to display the same “Something went wrong” message. So now, I can no longer view any of my Plex Media Server images/videos.
Now finally on to the iPad mobile app. Here is an example of what it is doing. I selected the main category (my wife & I), then year 2018, month 4 (April) & finally day (12th) as shown here…
It has only 5 images in it (number in order of viewing). I can either start with 1 or pick any other image to view, in this case I selected 1 and moved to the 2nd image…
You can see at the bottom of the display all five images. If I back out when I am viewing the second images (or any other images except the first one), the Plex Player app on the iPad crashes and is gone. I can go back in and start all over again, but I would have to drill down again. If, on the other hand, I use the five images below and using my touch move back to the very first image and display it and THEN back out, the app does not crash.
I know that I am long winded on this, but It is so important for me to have this resolved. This is really interrupting my access to all of the images/videos that I have accumulated.
Now, I will follow your article above and send you the logs as best I can. If I have difficulty finding/sending, I will update here.
