Question for you guys running this as a service with workaround.
Do you get bundles that auto update in the background?
Can you do the auto update/install or do you have to stop running as a service first?
Can you use Drive letters for network drives or strictly UNC?
Can you have it scan only media that has changed?
Any downsides you have found?
Question for you guys running this as a service with workaround.
Do you get bundles that auto update in the background?"YES NO PROBLEM WITH THIS. ADMIN RIGHTS NOT REQUIRED FOR BUNDLES UPDATES"
Can you do the auto update/install or do you have to stop running as a service first?
"NO AUTO UPDATE FOR THE SERVER SOFTWARE.
ALWAYS SHUTDOWN SERVICE AND MANUAL UPGRADE AND RESTART SERVICE.
FOR ME I USE DIFFERENT ADMIN ACCOUNT FOR UPGRADE AND INSTALLS SO I HAVE TO ALSO DO REGEDIT TO STOP PMS LAUNCHING IN ADMIN ACCOUNT"
Can you use Drive letters for network drives or strictly UNC?
"UNC ONLY OR LOCAL DRIVES"
Can you have it scan only media that has changed?
"THIS DOES NOT WORK FOR UNC. ONLY USE AUTO UPDATE ON PMS THAT USES LOCAL DRIVES"
Any downsides you have found?
"I DO NOT LIKE THE AUTO-RESTARTING OF CRASHING PMS PROCESS IN CJMURPH'S LATEST WRAPPER"
+1 and bump
+1 and bump
+1 for native support to run as a service.
+!
Yes please
+1
PLEASE stop the +1s and like the OP.
We’d probably have triple the Likes on this one, although this still should’ve been implemented by now
+1 - Sundi712, I always have done stuff people tell me not to do. 
Seriously, though, this is getting ridiculous. This thread is 3 years old. How many people need to tell you to do something as simple as make Plex Media Server run as a service before you actually do it??? I’ve known college freshmen who can turn an app into a service. It’s trivial with every development system available.
Why am I so ticked? I just tried to listen to a new CD that I ripped to Plex last night, and the damned server is offline - again. I’m 30 miles away. I’d be willing to bet that Windows Update downloaded some updates last night and rebooted the computer. All I know for sure is that a CD I wanted to listen to at work will have to wait until tonight because the Plex developers think spiffy new interfaces for Roku which make it 10 times harder to find your content are way more important than actually doing what nearly 19,000 people have said they wanted done.
sc create plex_service binPath= “c:\plex\path/plexexecutable.exe”
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/251192
Does this not satisfy this requirement? I haven’t run plex as a server from Windows since I have a few Linux boxing around the house, so I don’t know which binary you want to be running, but this would run anything in session 0, so shouldn’t cause any issues. Each time a user logs in a new session is created for that user, hence the multiple processes when connecting via RDP… There will be multiple sessions thus multiple plex instances. Only one instance of session 0 exists, and you never usually see it (unless you have a session 0 viewer running and are looking for it). It’s designed for headless processes but output certain dialogues.
Anyway, suggestions to anyone who is using plex as a server on Windows 8 or 10 pro, set up a Linux uVM using Hyper-V with the bare minimum dependencies for Plex to run. Allow bridged network access and share the directories containing your media from the host machine. Now, Plex is running in a hardware-isolated virtual machine. What that means is that because your Windows OS is already running within a hypervisor, the VM will boot up at the same time as Windows (usually it’ll be online quicker.) Regardless of what happens to Windows while you’re out and about (UAC prompts, rebooting for updates, whatever), your Linux machine will continue to run. The only thing to stop it would be a physical interference (power cut, cat sitting on machine power button, mouse gets chopped up by CPU fan and clogs causing overheating). Anyway, this (for the most part) is the solution to all of your problems.
@Brosh said:
sc create plex_service binPath= “c:\plex\path/plexexecutable.exe”sc.exe create | Microsoft Learn
Does this not satisfy this requirement? I haven’t run plex as a server from Windows since I have a few Linux boxing around the house, so I don’t know which binary you want to be running, but this would run anything in session 0, so shouldn’t cause any issues. Each time a user logs in a new session is created for that user, hence the multiple processes when connecting via RDP… There will be multiple sessions thus multiple plex instances. Only one instance of session 0 exists, and you never usually see it (unless you have a session 0 viewer running and are looking for it). It’s designed for headless processes but output certain dialogues.
Anyway, suggestions to anyone who is using plex as a server on Windows 8 or 10 pro, set up a Linux uVM using Hyper-V with the bare minimum dependencies for Plex to run. Allow bridged network access and share the directories containing your media from the host machine. Now, Plex is running in a hardware-isolated virtual machine. What that means is that because your Windows OS is already running within a hypervisor, the VM will boot up at the same time as Windows (usually it’ll be online quicker.) Regardless of what happens to Windows while you’re out and about (UAC prompts, rebooting for updates, whatever), your Linux machine will continue to run. The only thing to stop it would be a physical interference (power cut, cat sitting on machine power button, mouse gets chopped up by CPU fan and clogs causing overheating). Anyway, this (for the most part) is the solution to all of your problems.
Don’t know if you have read previous posts but there is already a solution in place that a lot of us are using. This topic here is to ask for an official solution from the Plex Team
See PMS As A Service
@sa2000 said:
See PMS As A Service
Good to know, didn’t really have time to read the whole thread or look in too much detail, but based on the number of suggestions for creating user accounts and stuff I figured it might be worth throwing out there a very simple way to run a service on Windows.
I still think the Hyper-V Linux VM would be a better move anyway - Hyper-V offers some great dynamic features such as memory optimisation (it can commit stuff to certain OS when they need it, effectively over-committing memory. Really neat to be able to run it with minimal impact in a more suitable (IMO) environment…
+1. Windows 10 forced reboots is basically making a lot of desktop based “servers” need to build Windows service versions of their backend. Plex is among them.
+1, for some reason, the work around I tried (run as a scheduled task) slowed down the transcoding process where I experienced constant pausing. Running it once logged in and the transcoder ran find. go figure.
Really needed with all the Windows 10 forced reboots. Getting serious grief from my wife when she can’t watch things because Plex is offline.
@MasterChiefmas said:
+1. Windows 10 forced reboots is basically making a lot of desktop based “servers” need to build Windows service versions of their backend. Plex is among them.
@OffColour said:
Really needed with all the Windows 10 forced reboots. Getting serious grief from my wife when she can’t watch things because Plex is offline.
Not sure what you mean here. If windows 10 is forcing a reboot the Plex Media Server Service running on the windows 10 machine would go down as well.
Are you perhaps asking for a different type of service?
Not sure what you mean here. If windows 10 is forcing a reboot the Plex Media Server Service running on the windows 10 machine would go down as well.
Are you perhaps asking for a different type of service?
We are asking for the core Plex engine to be adjusted so that it runs as a Windows service. The problem isn’t the reboot itself, since a reboot should bring the machine back up. The problem is that Plex runs on the desktop. Unless you want to have your machine autologin an account(and some of us have security issues with that), the Plex service doesn’t come back up.
If you are more familiar with *nix, we’re asking it to be the Windows equivalent of a daemon. I’m not sure how else to describe this…a service is kinda a basic thing…
Or I’ll let someone else do it for me…
Thanks - understood. - i fully understand the auto login aspect.
In the meantime we do have this third party solution which does work - PMS As A Service
I agree, official windows service support is one big missing feature
Yes, please do this. It’s a SERVER. It should run as a SERVICE on a SERVER OS.
