+1!!! =D Thank you!
Please!!! This is a badly needed feature.
I would like this option as well. I’m hoping by posting a comment it counts as a vote.
+1
Much needed feature for Windows.
Please have this run as a service
@darren-woods said:
I would like this option as well. I’m hoping by posting a comment it counts as a vote.
Clicking LIKE on the original (first) post is the only thing that counts as a vote
Now I’ve been living with the PMS-as-a-service-workaround for so long, but it should be really no problem to finally take over this workaround into the PMS.
Hope this will come this Year. Great Feature we need under Windows.
I agree, this would simplify my setup greatly, and give me access to a more powerful transcoder (I use Plex on Synology at the moment) that stays on no matter who is logged into the desktop.
It is silly that Plex reached version 1 and still hasn’t implemented this feature. For as long as people have been requesting this option we have to wonder why the Plex team haven’t added it.
Sure, there are workarounds with scheduled tasks or NSSM but we shouldn’t be forced to have to use those.
Battery backups only work consistently if power outages are the ONLY thing rebooting your server. For security, I let Windows auto-update important updates, which reboots automatically a minimum of once a month. Not to mention the times my cat walks on the UPS switch and reboots everything. 
+1
This would be nice to have.
I think it may be time to unsubscribe to this thread. If there was any hope of Plex ever doing this it would’ve been done within four years
+1 Much needed feature
@zcorneli said:
This is actually the default for linux PMS, and makes sense as the only reasonable way to run an “always on” service like PMS, Doubly so for people with dedicated servers (or a virtual server) just for their PMS (like I do).I’d recommend anyone running PMS in a virtual machine should run linux, unless there’s a need for a Silverlight plugin or iTunes is needed.
This is interesting to me, but I thought VMs didn’t really have access to the GPU of the machine. Doesn’t PLEX use the GPU for transcoding the video, or is it only the CPU for now?
How are there other feature requests with more likes ?
I certainly get this request and I run Plex on Windows myself. But what I don’t get is the big fuss some people make about this. It’s pretty darn easy to run Plex as a service if you want with any security level you want it to run under. You just need to create the user it will run under, set the permissions and then adjust Plex so it runs as a service using the username you just created.
If you are already running Plex then you would have to switch to UNC paths if needed and would have to manually handle updates yourself.
This to me is an “advanced feature” and does come with it’s own set of problems. If you go read the *nix forums on here you will see lots of threads with people who have fubarred their permissions, etc.
Just my own personal opinion but if you are advanced enough to understand security and know what a service is then why not just do it yourself? Granted it’s not an “out of box” solution but it’s easy enough to do regardless.
What am I missing?
Carlo
There is already a packaged solution by cjmurph that many of us use and links to that thread have been repeated many times in this thread - the only bit that you lose is auto updating and need to switch any mapped network drives to unc paths.
it is no hassle doing a manual update after stopping Plex through the provided service Windows system tray app and restarting Plex after the update through this same provided interface
@cayars said:
I certainly get this request and I run Plex on Windows myself. But what I don’t get is the big fuss some people make about this. It’s pretty darn easy to run Plex as a service if you want with any security level you want it to run under. You just need to create the user it will run under, set the permissions and then adjust Plex so it runs as a service using the username you just created.This to me is an “advanced feature” and does come with it’s own set of problems. If you go read the *nix forums on here you will see lots of threads with people who have fubarred their permissions, etc.
Just my own personal opinion but if you are advanced enough to understand security and know what a service is then why not just do it yourself? Granted it’s not an “out of box” solution but it’s easy enough to do regardless.
What am I missing?
Carlo
You may be missing the part that it makes no sense for Plex Media Server to run as an interactive application that must be explicitly launched by a user via a user login. It’s a really bad conceptual design.
Yeah, sure there is a hack that sort of does it but many Plex users are not technical enough to deal with setting it up as a service, and even if they are, since it not an official hack, they met be hesitant to do it. I am a programmer and I wrote a number of Windows services in the past, and I do not use this hack, because I noticed people complaining about various issues. Maybe they are not doing it correctly and it’s totally their fault, but I have enough of other Plex hassles to deal with already.
The point is that PMS must run as a service out-of-the box and it make no sense to keep it as is for years. It’s one of the most frequently requested features. I understand technical complexities related to conversion of the interactive app to a Windows service (e.g. permissions, network share access, desktop interaction logic), but it literally should not take an average programmer longer than a few days to address all of these issues. They already have an update service that runs as a Windows service for crying out loud. But no, let’s keep the PMS module an interactive app. So every time my kids or my wife want to watch something on Plex (it runs PMS under my account, and they use their own accounts to log in on the same box), I need to log in first. It makes no sense.
There are numerous tools to enable running Plex as a service and are trivial to setup.
Eg NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager
There are other feature requests where there is no quick work around that should have higher priority for Plex to resolve.
