That’s what I suspected.
It looks like you have a server on both the NAS and Windows machine.
On top of changing your account with the same email and password this is complicated lol.
You’ll have to log in to both and find out which one has your Plex pass attached to it
For over a year I daily went to this screen which shows my NAS drive and deposited new audio files into BenFold003. Then I opened Plex through my windows start menu (shown) and updated my library to show my new audio files. You are suggesting that it is a mystery whether that Plex icon in my start menu refers to Plex Media Server’s installation on my computer or my NAS? How can I choose to login to one or the other and Know it is not the other?
The Plex icon in your start menu is the Plex for Windows client. If it were Plex Media Server it would say “Plex Media Server” (on my Win10 system, anyway).
What is the IP address of your NAS?
It is OK to mention private addresses, such as 192.168… They are not reachable from the Internet.
The IP address of my NAS is like this - 192.168.1.xxx . One could not get into my Plex through the web, (if I gave the exact address) I think, unless one has my password and or PIN. Correct? Or is there another reason it is not accessible from the internet?
192.168.x.x address are private address space. They are not routed over the Internet.
One of my Plex servers has an IP address of 192.168.1.55. It does not matter that I publish that. That address stays local to my home network, just as the same address range says local to yours.
Your Internet router uses a process called Network Address Translation to let devices on your network communicate to the Internet. If someone knows only the internal, private IP address of your server, they cannot reach it from the Internet.
On your Win11 PC, point a browser at the IP address of the NAS:
http://192.168.1.xxx:32400/web ← http, not https
What happens?
It shows me the same Plex consumer page that shows when entering through the icon in my start menu which you pointed out is called the Plex for Windows client. First I must enter my PIN to see it.
Thanks. That indicates Plex Media Server is running on your NAS.
Now try http://192.168.1.xxx:32400/identity
You should see a web page with a few lines of text. Look for claimed=0 or claimed=1.
Next, we’ll check the Plex server on your Win11 system.
On the Win11 PC, go to http://127.0.0.1:32400/identity
If you see “this site cannot be reached” it mean Plex Media Server is not running.
Launch Plex Media Server (not Plex) and again try http://127.0.0.1:32400/identity
Do you see the claimed=0 or claimed=1?
it says claimed=1
Do you mean paste http://127.0.0.1:32400/identity into Explorer ? That does the same thing as in Chrome.
using http://127.0.0.1:32400/identity –
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
I do not know what it means to launch Plex Media Server when it is not clicking the icon in my start menu now known as windows Plex client.
On your Windows computer click the start menu in the lower left corner. Scroll down that list of programs and apps until you see Plex Media Server and double click it. Not “Plex” but “Plex Media Server”
Wait a minute, then use http://127.0.0.1:32400/identity
When I double click Nothing seems to happen except in the bottom R the Plex icon appears in that menu of open programs. You say Then Use. You mean paste the address into chrome browser or explorer address bar? Both of which seem to create the same result which seems to be this:
----<-MediaContainer size=“0” claimed=“0” machineIdentifier=“bc97f440de2f67a62c47ac289e42273efaad2064” version=“1.25.4.5426-eb46d070e”> </MediaContainer -->>>
Yes, that’s the only visual sign the server itself is running
The server on the NAS is claimed and it looks like the server on the Windows machine is not
I don’t know where exactly FordGuy was headed with you so wait for him to get back and give you further instructions
Haha, interesting. You have the “Plex Server” installed on your NAS AND your windows computer. Well, we might need to straighten out some terminology then.
COMPUTER LESSON! YAAY!
A “server” is a bit of software that simply “serves” information to another (a “client”). Plex is a combo system, where all "clients (Plex Media Player, Plex For Windows, Chrome browser, etc) connect to a “server” program running somewhere and is fed the media. If you play online games, you know the term “server” refers to the computer that your game “client” connects to to play a game. Alternatively, Netflix has “servers” all over the world, and your “Netflix app” on your phone or TV connects to the servers to get the media.
Plex works the same way, in that you have a “server” program that simply looks at your hard drives for media, figures out what they are based on the name, then “serves” that media to “clients” like a browser to be able to watch and enjoy.
Now, here is the interesting bit: Server software is usually invisible. That is, it serves data to clients automatically, without some dude sitting at a computer to pull a switch to send the info. Because of this, server software tends to NOT show anything when it is running. On your NAS, you don’t have to have a window open to your NAS to keep the server running. This is why, when you ran the “Plex Server” software on your computer, nothing happened other than a tiny icon in your taskbar. That means it is running. Once it was running, then going to the web page 127.0.0.1/web finally worked, showing a web page, or some text.
I think you must have installed the Plex server files on your Windows computer while messing around trying to get things to work. If you do not know the difference between client and server (a thing I don’t expect lots of people to know), it’s easy to install the wrong program, realize it didn’t do what you want, and install the client and THAT now works fine.
The cool thing about computers and networks? most “servers” do not have to be on the same computer as the data/movies that they “serve”. I set up my Plex server on a standalone computer sitting in a dark closet. Next to it is my NAS where my media is stored. The “server” simply knows how to call up the NAS to see the movies, pulls them over to itself for a short time, then sends that out to my iphone when I try to watch something.
This can be a bit difficult to set up, though, as you need a bit of a crash course in computer networking to get it working fine. Whats much easier to do is to have the server AND media in the same box. This is what you have, with the server installed on the MyCloud NAS of yours. This works great, and might even be setup ahead of time to look at your NAS’s media shares automatically.
LESSON OVER
The problem here seems to be that we have some confusion regarding whether the server is on your Windows computer or the NAS. I suspect that the NAS is your master server, but you made references to deleting items in the Windows registry. This would ONLY be necessary if you are actually using the server installed on your computer.
I hope this clears up some thing for you/others. FordGuy’s doing some good steps walking you through trying to figure out whats up.
PS:
FYI, when we ask you to enter an IP into something, almost universally it will be in a browser. File Explorer can access computers by their IP, but it’s usually just to access files. File Explorer can’t do anything other than “explore” for “files”. I can’t think of any reason we’d ask you to enter IPs into Explorer, so go on ahead and punch it into Chrome from now on unless we say otherwise.
This is a lesson that I needed. JaysPlex7 says the server (that I evidently installed) on my NAS is claimed. Why can I not see the library that I built? I named my server BeMyCloPR4100, a name that formerly was visible in my Plex for Windows client.
Ah, well, that’s the mystery. The name you give your Plex server can be anything. Since you seemed so confused about what is a server and what isn’t, means we might be barking up the wrong tree. It’s quite possible that the server you have always used might be the one installed on the Windows computer, not the one installed on the NAS. You can “own” multiple servers on an account at once. I have heard of others here on the forums doing so. It’s fairly trivial (for techies) to have them all point at the same media source, yet each server is technically separate from eachother.
Since you managed to “claim” the NAS server, but it doesn’t seem to be showing you your movie content? What do you see when you open the Plex client? (The Plex icon, that you have always used to watch movies). Is there a message front-and-center here, and what does it say?
Edit: Hmm. How did you access your server in the past? You claimed to access server.local.ip.address:32400/web previously. Is this IP the same as your NAS server? (You don’t need to tell me the number itself, it wouldn’t mean anything to us even if you did)
If you typed \\server.local.ip.address into explorer and that got you to your NAS, then it’s probably your NAS then…
(You may realize when I try to paste into this forum a phrase or address such as you seem to have typed including an IP address, this site converts it or adds to it a bunch of weird characters. It makes me wonder if the address phrase you suggest to me is what you intended. I find it unusable leading to dead end.)
Formerly I could enter through the windows plex client in my start menu or through Plex.TV. Both ways required my PIN until it failed 15 Oct. Then I began this struggle. Some Plex support articles suggested that one can enter various ways including such as you suggest. I am not sure if what worked then is what you suggest, which is a dead end at this moment. Then 15 Oct I could find my libraries in that sort of way only. As of the 31 of oct right before I changed my password and got a new PIN upon the suggestion of the folks at HQ who were instructing me via email, I could get in and see my libraries. It was asking me to enroll in Plex Pass which I had done a year prior. After changing password, no way of the many ways one can enter ones account would ever show me my libraries, including clicking more. However it seemed to quit asking me to enroll in Plex Pass. Now when I put in an explorer address bar this [\192.168.1.140](file://192.168.1.140) it shows me the folders in my NAS as it always did. Today when I click the windows Plex client in my start menu and enter my PIN, it shows me the many wonderful options of movies and menus of the Plus consumer screen as though I am just starting with Plex for the very first time. At one moment on 15 oct when I was floundering to get Plex working, some screen I was on requested that I select my server . There was my custom server name BeMyCloPR4100. I clicked on it. It seemed I was correcting whatever had foiled my PIN. It seemed that I was rebuilding my account. It gave me the impression that my cherished libraries are floating around in cyberspace waiting for me to once again claim them. I have no idea how I got to that screen or whether it was relevant to my real problem.
At this moment, when I paste >> server.local.ip.address:32400/web << into my browser address bar or \server.local.ip.address it says this site cannot be reached. Am I supposed to substitute my server IP address for the term address? If I do that, like this [\server.local.ip.192.168.1.140](file://server.local.ip.192.168.1.140) it shows me a bunch of google search results.
You don’t type “server.local.ip.address” at all
You substitute the ip address of your server in place of that
I think FordGuy was trying to get you to tell him the ip address of your server so he could fill everything in for you and make this easy for you
If the ip address of your NAS is 192.168.1.140 you would type
http://192.168.1.140:32400/web <–just click this
Lesson time!
Remember earlier, how I said IP addresses are the “phone numbers” of computers? This is true of all computers around the entire world. But they quickly realized that asking people to remember very arbitrary number clumps (192.168.0.1) would be impossible for any human. So they invented Domain Names. These are the “name” you enter in your browser. Putting in the “name” of the computer you want to access works just as well as the IP address. So now, it’s kind of like a phone book entry. So if you want to find google’s search engine, you don’t have to enter http://142.250.72.46 in your browser address bar, http://google.com works, and is much easier to remember.
Interestingly, this is also true of local computer names. This is why you can enter HTTP://YOUR-NAS-NAME into your browser (or \\YOUR-NAS-NAME into your explorer window) to access your NAS. These computer names are only used locally (in your house), I would not be able to get to your NAS by typing in the name here at my house. Local computer names are kind of powerful like that, because you automatically trust everything in your own house, so local names have priority over the same name on the internet.
A lot of network (internet) traffic has a kind of… shape… for how it is packaged. Web sites (like this forum, or when you go to google to search, use a shape or “protocol” called HTTP and HTTPS (Secure). By entering HTTP:// in front of a computer’s name, it’s a way of saying "I want to get the web page that this computer wants to “serve”. So you would enter “HTTP://google.com” to tell your browser to get the web page at google. There are a lot of other protocols for other things, but HTTP/HTTPS are the ones that browsers use, and unless you are a computer programmer you are unlikely to use ANY other kind of protocol. (Other kinds of protocols are FTP and SSH)
Ok, so now that we know that when we put in a computer name (google.com) into our browser, we want to get the web page at that computer (that’s what browsers do. they get the web page, and display it to you). Forums, like the one we are at, try to help us out. If you enter a web address that LOOKS like one, the forum tries to be helpful, and makes it so you can easily click it to load the web page. But if I want to stop that, I can remove the HTTP:// from the start of the link (it’s not necessary anyway) and give you a link that isn’t really a link.
Forums automatically turning a web address into a link is handy, but sometimes I want to tell you to load up a web site, but I don’t know the name. This happened earlier. We wanted you to go to the web page that your Plex server on your NAS has. Since I didn’t know the name or IP of your NAS, I try to put a “hint” or placeholder text, and I expected you to put the correct info there in its place. Up above, Ford said to go to http://server.local.ip.address:32400/web, but that would not work as a link, because server.local.ip.address is NOT the name of your NAS. The server.local.ip.address part is the placeholder, and it’s a common way for computer techies to tell eachother how to type addresses. We wanted you to put your NAS name/IP in that spot instead, but we weren’t very clear about it. I try to make it more obvious, by doing something like HTTP://YOUR-NAS-IP-HERE:32400/web, but even that isn’t very clear if you aren’t a techie like us.
LESSON OVER.
Now that we know your NAS IP, we will probably include the links you should click, and those will work without having to edit them. Don’t worry, these links won’t work for anyone on the ENTIRE internet except for you. (Actually, if I click that link, it will try to find a computer in my own house with that IP and ask for its web page. There is no computer at that IP, so it fails)
Click JaysPlex7’s link to get to your Plex server’s page.
OK. When I click that I am invited to enter my PIN. It shows the consumer Plex screen with some commercial movies to stream. It invites me to begin adding my media as though this is the very first moment I ever used Plex. It shows none of my own familiar libraries. I used mostly audio but I had ripped 5 DVD’s and often noticed my own library of movies. Note, before my trouble began 15 oct, I frequently left my house with my computer turned off and my NAS on. I was able to enjoy my Plex audio library through the Plexamp app in my phone. Does the fact that my computer was off imply that the installation of the Plex media server software that I was using was necessarily on my NAS?
Good Lesson
If you didn’t download the music onto your phone ahead of time, then it may be safe to assume that when your computer is off and your NAS is on, being able to stream music still means it’s likely to be the NAS. I’m leaning towards that being the case now. If we determine that this is the case, then when we are all done here it might be a good idea to uninstall the server from your Windows computer so this confusion doesn’t come up again in the future. But for now, leave it in place until we know for sure.
Ok, so what I worry about with your NAS, is that the libraries you set up might have been deleted. Your MEDIA itself should still be safe (can you still find it using explorer?), but Plex just “forgot” to look for the media. You might have to make new libraries.
Remember I asked what was in this screen before? Do you see your NAS Plex server name in this list? Do you see the libraries you made below them?
