@gbmaxse said:
This thing flat out REFUSES to let me log in. I go to “check credentials:” and it fails every effing time. I’m following the directions, so I simply do not understand.
Hi, can you give some more detail on what you’re doing? Remember you need to fully qualify the user name. If it’s a user local to the machine you can use a period in place of the machine name.
Eg .\username
@“brian.don” said:
Having problems with “PMS as a service”. Previously, I never had problems with it being accessible outside of home. Since running as a service, it rarely is accessible without another reboot or too … which negates the whole value of running as a service if I have to massage it before it works. Anybody else with that problem?Also… If I decide to do it, how do I uninstall “PMS as a service” and go back to the generic PMS within my account?
Another user has said that the upnp service needs to be running for remote access to work. That service is on by default on my PC, but might be worth checking.
To uninstall, go to add remove programs and uninstall it.
@cjmurph said:
@gbmaxse said:
This thing flat out REFUSES to let me log in. I go to “check credentials:” and it fails every effing time. I’m following the directions, so I simply do not understand.Hi, can you give some more detail on what you’re doing? Remember you need to fully qualify the user name. If it’s a user local to the machine you can use a period in place of the machine name.
Eg .\username
I’ve tried every combo I can think of. I’m running plex media server on my win 10 desktop. my uid is gbmaxse, I am positive of the password. Ive tried .\gbmaxse, ive tried the OFFICE-PC\gbmaxse Ive tried my email address. Lol I feel like an idiot
@gbmaxse said:
@cjmurph said:
@gbmaxse said:
This thing flat out REFUSES to let me log in. I go to “check credentials:” and it fails every effing time. I’m following the directions, so I simply do not understand.Hi, can you give some more detail on what you’re doing? Remember you need to fully qualify the user name. If it’s a user local to the machine you can use a period in place of the machine name.
Eg .\usernameI’ve tried every combo I can think of. I’m running plex media server on my win 10 desktop. my uid is gbmaxse, I am positive of the password. Ive tried .\gbmaxse, ive tried the OFFICE-PC\gbmaxse Ive tried my email address. Lol I feel like an idiot
When you run the installer, it puts the current logged in users name in the box in the correct format. Just make sure when you type in your password that you don’t have caps lock on by mistake.
sa2000 and cjmurph,
I checked and I have only one each of the following Plex processes running.
So … I posted the message above and after turning the power on and off a couple of times to fix a light switch, the Remote Access is now “fully accessible”?
Question: Is there a setting somewhere that says you have to wait X seconds before it becomes available outside of the home network?
UPnP was “manual” and I changed it to Automatic, rebooted and rechecked. Still not accessible.
I removed the PMS as a Service to try to restore “normal” operation. After rebooting, it still says not accessible outside. After trying to research the Remote Access tips on the site, I rechecked and it is back and accessible. Certainly feels like there is a timer somewhere that it resetting things.
Regards,
Brian
@“brian.don” said:
sa2000 and cjmurph,I checked and I have only one each of the following Plex processes running.
- Plex Media Server.exe
- Plex Service.exe
- Plex Tuner Service.exe
- Plex Update Service.exe
- Plex Service Tray.exe
So … I posted the message above and after turning the power on and off a couple of times to fix a light switch, the Remote Access is now “fully accessible”?
- I changed nothing.
- I don’t have any of the network customization which are detailed in the support documentation.
- I had restarted the Cable Modem, the router and the WiFi hub prior to the light switch work. (… so don’t think the restart solved anything).
Question: Is there a setting somewhere that says you have to wait X seconds before it becomes available outside of the home network?
UPnP was “manual” and I changed it to Automatic, rebooted and rechecked. Still not accessible.
I removed the PMS as a Service to try to restore “normal” operation. After rebooting, it still says not accessible outside. After trying to research the Remote Access tips on the site, I rechecked and it is back and accessible. Certainly feels like there is a timer somewhere that it resetting things.
Regards,
Brian
Hi Brian, sorry you’re having issues. This seems to be a plex issue rather than a service specific problem, it might be worth starting a new thread rather than having your issue get lost in amongst the noise of this thread.
It will take time for your server to register with plex.tv and become available. I’m not sure how long you should expect that to take. Lots of things can affect your plex server’s connectivity, do you run anti-virus/firewall on the pc? have there been any recent updates to that software? has there been any recent windows updates that could have caused this? have you tried manually port forwarding in your router? how are you attempting to remotely access the server?
good luck!
@cjmurph said:
@gbmaxse said:
@cjmurph said:
@gbmaxse said:
This thing flat out REFUSES to let me log in. I go to “check credentials:” and it fails every effing time. I’m following the directions, so I simply do not understand.Hi, can you give some more detail on what you’re doing? Remember you need to fully qualify the user name. If it’s a user local to the machine you can use a period in place of the machine name.
Eg .\usernameI’ve tried every combo I can think of. I’m running plex media server on my win 10 desktop. my uid is gbmaxse, I am positive of the password. Ive tried .\gbmaxse, ive tried the OFFICE-PC\gbmaxse Ive tried my email address. Lol I feel like an idiot
When you run the installer, it puts the current logged in users name in the box in the correct format. Just make sure when you type in your password that you don’t have caps lock on by mistake.
Fixed. IT was an issue of using a windows microsoft live account vs a local account. all good now
I recall a post somewhere in here that Plex was going to natively run as a service, any word on that?
I’m just about to setup a new Plex Media Server and I want to be sure I have it setup the best it can be.
Also any issue with using ReFS instead of NTFS for the media drive?
@gbmaxse said:
Fixed. IT was an issue of using a windows microsoft live account vs a local account. all good now
Been have similar issues - fresh install of W10 pro and using office365 acccount for auth under AzureAD - and when i try to install Plex Service and set to start as my AzureAD account PMS is configured under it verified the account/password correctly but then errors during install with “Service ‘PlexService’ (PlexService) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.”
The account is a domain admin and it’s a vanilla install with a basic office365 account.
If i try and start the service manually during the install then i receive a “Windows could not start the PlexService service on Local Computer. Error 1059: Circular service dependency was specified.”
If i set the service up to run as a Local System user is does, however it’s obviously lost all the PMS config from my user.
My other attempt was to set the AzureAD account up to auto login to Windows (as it did before the re-install) but i’ve just wasted hours of my life proving that’s NOT possible 
@richardjgreenuk said:
Don’t know about you guys, but I have a preference to run things like PMS as the LocalSystem account instead of a user account.I found that if you use the PlexMediaServer-Service.exe from this thread, with a couple of tweaks, we can make this run without any issues as LocalSystem.
Get PMS configured how you want it as you would normally.
- Install PMS Service from this thread.
You need to enter a valid username during the installer as it performs SID matching on the user account but you can enter any rubbish for the password.- Stop the PMS on your server and wait for all of the processes to terminate.
- Copy the Plex Media Server folder from %LOCALAPPDATA% to C:\ProgramData
- Go to the registry and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Plex, Inc. and Export the folder including all sub-folders to a .reg file.
- Open the .reg file in Notepad and edit the following:
Change all the references to HKEY_CURRENT_USER with HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18 (the SID for the LocalSystem account)
* Change the LocalAppDataPath string value to C:\ProgramData
- Save the .reg file and then double-click it to import the file contents into the registry.
- Open services.msc and edit the properties of the PmsService and change the Logon to Local System Account
Enjoy. This worked perfectly for me and meant that I don’t need a dedicated account to run PMS and it can happily run as the System account.
I would like to offer a bit of feedback for the PMS Service installer if I may. Would it be possible for future versions to set the recovery actions to Restart the Service so that if the PMS Service fails, it will automatically restart? I think it would also be recommended to set this service to depend on the NetMan service so that PMS doesn’t try to come up before the Network Connections service. If this happened, you wouldn’t have any interfaces to bind to.
This info has thankfully got everything up and running nicely under the Local System user 
@Sonic_UK said:
@gbmaxse said:
Fixed. IT was an issue of using a windows microsoft live account vs a local account. all good nowBeen have similar issues - fresh install of W10 pro and using office365 acccount for auth under AzureAD - and when i try to install Plex Service and set to start as my AzureAD account PMS is configured under it verified the account/password correctly but then errors during install with “Service ‘PlexService’ (PlexService) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.”
The account is a domain admin and it’s a vanilla install with a basic office365 account.
If i try and start the service manually during the install then i receive a “Windows could not start the PlexService service on Local Computer. Error 1059: Circular service dependency was specified.”
If i set the service up to run as a Local System user is does, however it’s obviously lost all the PMS config from my user.
My other attempt was to set the AzureAD account up to auto login to Windows (as it did before the re-install) but i’ve just wasted hours of my life proving that’s NOT possible
You just need to add the “log on as a service” role to the account. The installer attempts it, but it doesn’t seem to work in windows 10. Here’s the Microsoft docs article describing how to do that.
I am noticing that Plex is not detecting hardware acceleration for transcoding.
It seems to happen because session 0 does not have access to hardware drivers.
More in this link:http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/306168/dvr-transcode-ignored-on-hdhomerun-prime#latest
and
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/294293/plex-hardware-transcoding-not-working-for-me-am-i-missing-something-simple
That sounds pretty important.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the service was built-in as options.
One should bomb the developers with posts,
brian.don forums+d93994-s6025034@plex.tv schrieb am Mo., 15. Jan. 2018,
01:32:
any reason plex would no longer work after uninstalling pms as a service?
everything was running, but having issues with session 0 stuff and decided to uninstall pms as a service, did that then manually launched the plex exe… the square plex tray icon comes up fine… looks to be good, but if i try and access the server via my normal bookmark chrome says the site can’t be reached.
accessing via plex.tv web app doesn’t work either. says that server is offline. no devices can access it, tautulli says there was an error communicating with your plex server.
All i’ve changed is i went into add/remove programs and uninstalled pms as a service.
tried accessing it via localhost, 127.0.0.1, its 192.168 ip, and its static public ip, all the same issue. tried disabling the firewall too for giggles.
tried to repair the plex install, no luck. tried to uninstall plex and reinstall, no luck.
**Rebooted the server and that finally got it to come back up… weird.
Is there a way to have the pmsservice start plex via command line or PS? The plexupdate4win PS scripts are great at automatically checking the plexpass repo, downloading the latest version, killing the “plex media server.exe” task, running a silent install, creating a log entry, and emailing the results. It doesn’t quite manage to restart plex, though! The service is still running after an update, but PMS itself is not. I can log in to the server and check using the tray icon and manually start pms that way, but that kind of defeats the purpose of automating the updates. I can easily add a line to the PS script, but I don’t know how to make the call to the service wrapper.
Right now I have just added two lines to stop and the start the service, which nets me the result I need (PMS starts with the service), but that seems a little inelegant…
EDIT: I also opened an issue on GitHub with the plexupdate4win dev, and he pointed out that the service wrapper should have an option to restart PMS after a specified timeout if it stops. I had apparently disabled this option at some point in years past so that it would stay stopped while I was under the hood, and did not re-enable it. I’ll know if that fixed it (it should) the next time there is an update.
Question I thought of last night for a possible improvement. Though I suspect the people that would use it would be very few.
Does this support using a "Group managed Service Account?
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2012/12/16/windows-server-2012-group-managed-service-accounts/
From a security perspective it would be nice, though as it would require an AD environment I doubt many plex users have a 2012R2 functional level domain to be able to use a gMSA.
Also it might be tricky to get plex going as you can’t interactively login to a gMSA as the password is never known and changes every 30 days by default.
Thanks for working on this. I wish plex supported windows services theirselves.
Hi
I am trying to set this up, having previously used NSSM (I have completely removed the NSSM service and restarted the machine). I’m running windows 10 professional, 64 bit. Plex works fine from NSSM and locally and I have the Start Plex on Login setting disabled.
When I open the MSI I get the account screen, the test credentials works ok. I then get a popup saying “The system cannot open the device or file specified” with Retry or Cancel buttons. Retrying gives the same, Cancel gives the message “The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2755”
I’ve not spotted any messages with this error code.
Please advise, TIA
@Hassled1 said:
Hi
I am trying to set this up, having previously used NSSM (I have completely removed the NSSM service and restarted the machine). I’m running windows 10 professional, 64 bit. Plex works fine from NSSM and locally and I have the Start Plex on Login setting disabled.
When I open the MSI I get the account screen, the test credentials works ok. I then get a popup saying “The system cannot open the device or file specified” with Retry or Cancel buttons. Retrying gives the same, Cancel gives the message “The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2755”
I’ve not spotted any messages with this error code.
Please advise, TIA
Hi, I know this doesn’t help you, but I have no idea what that could be. Try redownloading the msi.
