Hi
Assuming I’ll eventually get an invite to Plex Cloud (maybe Dec 5) - should I start uploading content to my Cloud Drive now so I have some content when I get an invite, or will this not work. I understood I chose folders on the cloud like I do locally so I think it should work but don’t want to upload all these files and find I can’t use them.
(My upload is pretty slow so this is why I wanted to get a head start)
Ernie
This question has been answered already. You can start uploading your content ahead of getting the invitation. Plex Cloud works with existing cloud drives, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You may want to keep your folder hierarchy when uploading, though.
Got this in a email today:
First, we expect to begin ramping up invites starting December 5th! While we can’t promise when exactly you may receive an invitation, know that we are eager to share Plex Cloud with many more people as soon as possible. We can assure you that we will not rest until every one of you is up and Plexing in the Cloud!
Second, Starting today, we’re announcing new support for Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive! All three of these Cloud storage providers will be available to anyone whose account is chosen to participate in the beta. Now we’ve made managing your media in the Cloud more flexible by allowing you to link multiple Cloud storage providers, so you can create libraries with content from any of them.
Finally, while we have been able to introduce many new improvements to our underlying Plex Cloud infrastructure, we have run into technical challenges with the Amazon Drive integration. We are working hard to resolve the issues, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, we really hope you can help us test and validate the other Cloud storage provider integrations once we get you into the Beta
I just stopped my upload. I got a feeling by the time they figure out the “technical challenges,” Amazon will no longer be offering unlimited space. It looks like all the major cloud services are setting the price to around $100/yr a TB.
My recommendation would be to just upload a representative sampling of all of your media, especially if you have monthly allowances. That should be enough for testing, which is all users of Plex Cloud really should be doing. People who are uploading 40TB of data to a beta product are kind of silly ;).
Does this mean Amazon drive is on a back burner for plex cloud - and google etc are preferred ?
I signed up to Amazon drive purely for plex cloud - although tbh it’s nice to have unlimited storage backup.
@jowl said:
Does this mean Amazon drive is on a back burner for plex cloud - and google etc are preferred ?
Yes, it certainly seems that way at the moment. I guess cheap unlimited storage comes with a price of extreme limitations, something the other services apparently do not suffer from.
No one seems to have any concerns with the risk of putting the content in a cloud? Let say out of the 40TB someone here said, how much of that data is “legally ripped” content? Probably not much.
Idea :
Why is Plex didn’t create a “Plex Media Uploader” (service) that encrypts the content “On-the-fly” locally before it goes up in the cloud, at least, the content would be crypted. Then, in the “special” Cloud build of PMS, they could put code for recognizing media out of encrypted files. And the “Magic” could be in the Player that decrypt locally while receiving the content from the PMS when playing…
This seems a bit odd (but not being part of the beta yet I don’t know what issues there currently are)
But I run my own (plex cloud) version using a dedicated server running plex and amazon drive mounted via acd_cli and it works pretty well.
I can stream 25GB plus blurays quite well (direct stream with audio transcoding)
So I am curious as to where the issues are with the plex implementation… and how and why it would be better with other providers (I suppose possibly less calls to the amazon api) as I guess they are still using amazon for the server part.
But as I got the email regarding expanding the program, hopefully I’ll get an invite soon and be able to compare
Just to clarify, we will start inviting more people into the beta on December 5th. We can’t guarantee your invitation will come exactly on the 5th. Our goal is to get as many people as possible into the beta. I personally would discourage any massive upload advance of getting into the beta. This is a closed beta (not like a Plex Pass pre-release) and pretty much everything is subject to change.
I have no expectations regarding the invitation timeframe 
It would just be nice to get in to be able to compare what I have working with the plex implementation.
@kinoCharlino said:
Just to clarify, we will start inviting more people into the beta on December 5th. We can’t guarantee your invitation will come exactly on the 5th. Our goal is to get as many people as possible into the beta. I personally would discourage any massive upload advance of getting into the beta. This is a closed beta (not like a Plex Pass pre-release) and pretty much everything is subject to change.
thankyou for the info, i will wait until the invite comes through before purchasing the amazon storage.
The problems. at least some of them, that have been encountered with Amazon regarding Plex Cloud’s implementation are related to “rate limiting” and some of the clients, Roku is one, make a rather huge number of requests when accessing/starting a stream. That is a primary reason that I cannot successfully stream to my Rokus 99% of the time but other clients (Fire TV, Shield TV and Raspberry PI running PMP) work better but not perfectly. I think they all have some limitations regarding rate limiting. I often get the message, “Your server is not fast enough to stream this video” but when I dismiss that message the videos stream mostly fine on all my clients except my Rokus.
The rate limiting by Amazon is impacting everything but the other, much more expensive, services like DropBox do not implement any rate limiting so they work better.
I doubt that, unless Plex figures a way around rate limiting or Amazon provides a way to avoid the problem, Amazon Cloud will ever be a completely viable place to host media for Plex Cloud. But it does make a reasonably good backup solution.
I stopped uploading to Amazon for Plex Cloud some time ago as I have enough there for testing and I have switched over to uploading for backup purposes using GoodSync (with encryption) and my current plan is to continue to test Plex Cloud but I do not plan on actually using it for real viewing after testing is over unless something changes dramatically.
Running a local server is plenty good enough for me and the cost is inconsequential to me. Plex Cloud is a great idea but, without reliable Amazon Cloud implementation, it is just too expensive for my library.
Once my backup completes, in a year or so, keeping the backup current will be easy. I do not completely like relying on the cloud for backup BUT I have original disks/tapes for 90-95% of my library stored off site so I should be fine even if there is a disaster and, again once the backup finishes, I will not even need “duplication” on much of my “DrivePool” and that will free up a lot of disk space so even with some failures I should be good for a long time.
I am not completely giving up on Plex Cloud but I am dialing back my plans involving it. I hope that my concerns prove wrong.
@blim5001 said:
I have no expectations regarding the invitation timeframe
It would just be nice to get in to be able to compare what I have working with the plex implementation.
I don’t blame you. We are ramping up the closed beta, though… so you should hear more information, more often. We’re getting a lot of good stuff for engineering to focus on this week as Ninjas and current Beta users give our new cloud storage provider options a spin. Also, we’re getting to see how the less visible under-the-hood changes are working before we unleash it to a larger beta group.
Some good info here. For those of us with multiple terabytes of data, the alternate cloud providers can easily become cost prohibitive. It’s all well and good for testing, but looking ahead long-term, a total cloud solution that doesn’t involve Amazon Cloud Drive is going to be expensive.
@mdnitoil said:
Some good info here. For those of us with multiple terabytes of data, the alternate cloud providers can easily become cost prohibitive. It’s all well and good for testing, but looking ahead long-term, a total cloud solution that doesn’t involve Amazon Cloud Drive is going to be expensive.
What I’m afraid of is that the new kids on the block are getting all the attention… leaving the only affordable solution (Amazon) out in the cold. I’m hoping this is because it’s all new and exciting to the team and that it will level off into giving all services equal TLC, but I’m not holding my breath… it’s been spelled out loud and clear that the only troublesome solution right now is Amazon.
I’m not involved with the beta, so I wouldn’t know. I do find it odd since the cloud processing is still hosted by Amazon, regardless of where the data is sourced from. It would be rather ironic that Amazon cloud processing works better with Googledrive than their own cloud storage.
@mdnitoil said:
I’m not involved with the beta, so I wouldn’t know. I do find it odd since the cloud processing is still hosted by Amazon, regardless of where the data is sourced from. It would be rather ironic that Amazon cloud processing works better with Googledrive than their own cloud storage.
The Cloud processing is not hosted on Amazon. Only user storage is hosted there for those beta users who have linked Amazon Drive. Plex Cloud server and transcoding are currently hosted on Microsoft Azure, although that is subject to change. We are evaluating a number of computer platforms to determine the best option.
@pducharme said:
No one seems to have any concerns with the risk of putting the content in a cloud? Let say out of the 40TB someone here said, how much of that data is “legally ripped” content? Probably not much.Idea :
Why is Plex didn’t create a “Plex Media Uploader” (service) that encrypts the content “On-the-fly” locally before it goes up in the cloud, at least, the content would be crypted. Then, in the “special” Cloud build of PMS, they could put code for recognizing media out of encrypted files. And the “Magic” could be in the Player that decrypt locally while receiving the content from the PMS when playing…
They can’t transcode encrypted media… And they said doing the decrypting in the cloud would require too much processing.
Plus there’s the issue of the key having to be stored in the cloud, so not THAT secure…
@kinoCharlino said:
The Cloud processing is not hosted on Amazon. Only user storage is hosted there for those beta users who have linked Amazon Drive. Plex Cloud server and transcoding are currently hosted on Microsoft Azure, although that is subject to change. We are evaluating a number of computer platforms to determine the best option.
Thanks, that answers one of my questions. and makes a bit of sense afaik MS Azure are one of the few providers that do not charge (at least for the server) when servers are not switched on. So if Plex are spinning up the servers on demand they would only incur server costs when people are actually using their ‘Plex Cloud’
This is just speculation and guesswork, but if as it appears to be, it is a rate limiting issue then at the moment all requests must be using the Plex amazon cloud drive api key (and judging by the issues with cloud sync to ACD as well this probably uses the same api key).
I hope I am wrong, but unless Plex can convince Amazon to increase the allowed api rate, then we might be out of luck to be able to use Plex Cloud (and probably Cloud Sync) with ACD
Amazon used to allow anyone to get an api key, but have now changed the process so you need to request access to the api and it seems unless you are a major player they will refuse access to api.
If you could have used your own api key, that might have been a way to get around the rate limiting issue, as from what i recall before they changed the api access terms, the limits applied to each api key.
(Although having to go and get your own api key might be a bit too technical for your average user and Plex would need to add the facility to add your own api key as well).
And I think its probably unlikely that Amazon will reverse their decision regarding api access.
As has been said already, there is no one else that comes close to ACD for pricing. So for those with large libraries, we maybe out of luck with Plex Cloud.
