I just bought the TS-659 Pro II a few months ago.
I bought the TS-459 Pro II four years ago.
But what’s the point?
I am regularly scanning the forum, the blog… no announcement has been made that these SERVERS will be discontinued. None. Plex staff only took notice of this because a user tried - not because they tested their alpha/beta on these machines…
The last 1.14.1 release is very buggy for the DVR feature which is important to me.
Servers are not upgraded every four or five years… in a private household. They are fully okay and having state-of-the-art almost new hard drives in it (more than 20 TB in total).
This is nothing that you want to buy once again just because libraries are updated (for whatever it’s worth).
If you believe, that I will spend a few thousands of bucks because Plex changed the Plex libraries, then there is no need for further discussing this… I simply don’t have the budget for that. This is not MY fault or error.
I am working in high tech environment. End of Life is announced. End of support is announced, end of life is avoided as long as possible. Nobody just says… oops. Sorry. End of support.
A word to the developers / management:
If you fix bugs in the 1.14… version, and leave that PMS server version be compatible for two years… I would not say a word. I could plan having a budget by then.
If you don’t … watch the client wander away wearing his brand-new “never-come-back” shoes.
@ChuckPa Thank you for your efforts in finding the reason for that. I will think about using another machine for PMS… testing that. Is there a way to transfer libraries between active servers?
Thank you for the list… and QNAP continues support and security updates till end of 2020. Which is the two years I was speaking about… not nice, that you ignored it.
How about Plex’ policy about this? No, thank you, You don’t want to help here, you want only to prove your point. It is like slapping me in my face and telling me how crazy I’ve been to trust on ongoing support which just ended without a warning. And more so since everyone at Plex seemed to be caught by surprise.
How about… uhhh, yes, we weren’t aware of that, that is not good and in the long term, we need to move on. But we discussed it and as it is a deal breaker for some customers, we continue to fix the bugs in 1.14… for a foreseeable time. But we warn you that after time frame x, no further updates will come out and that these devices will not get any further features that we implement.
But really, this is something that must be done on a higher level in the company… software developers are not the persons who should decide this as it is not in their core interest. Rather than implementing a policy like this, a software developer would tell customers to buy new hardware.
Again, I can’t see the point in discussing this any further until you send a couple of hundred bucks my way for me to invest in new hardware.
Again, thank you @ChuckPa. I will have to check my options here. DVR feature is so buggy in the 1.14.1 version for me (which is why I am thinking of switching to another software for DVR anyway - you worked on DVR in 1.15 and I wanted to see if this would help me in my decision). I must decide what to do now… I will be on a business trip from Monday on, so I won’t do anything until my return. If I stay with Plex, I will get in contact with you about moving libaries. Are there any limits OS-wise when moving libraries, database-wise or otherwise? Is it possibly to merge three PMS into one - adding the two QNAP PMS libries to the Windows PMS which is on 1.15.0 beta already?
@rossinior - sorry for the troubles here. We actually have a policy and we decided to EOL PMS for QNAP devices that no longer have a supported version of the OS upstream, this is of course not the answer you where looking for and I totally understand that and respect that. But in all honesty we have supported older version of GLIBC for a very very long time and it was getting to the point where it was hindering our adoption of new technologies, which hurt all customers. We now support a minimum of GLIBC 2.14 which is still almost 7 years old at this point.
What we totally failed on here is to include this in the notes (like we did for TheCus devices for example) and remove the build from our site. That’s 100 my fault and I deeply apologize for that.
I am sure @ChuckPa don’t mind helping you move your library if you decide to stay with Plex. Thanks for understanding and once again please accept my apology for the bad rollout.
I appreciate that you came forward and I appreciate the tone of that answer. Your apology is accepted.
It always helps if you see the those decision and actions through the eyes of the people being affected.
I will remember to get in contact with @ChuckPa about migrating libaries once I have a plan on how to generally act.
I really hope that you are open to a kind request. As PMS Version 1.14.x is the last Firmware that these kind of servers will see, I would be very glad to ask for a favour.
1.14.1 is full of bugs - regarding DVR (most of them introduced with the 1.14 software). 1.15.0 has some bugs fixed in this regard (and I am sure others will follow in further 1.15 releases).
I know that this would mean extra efforts from your and your team’s side @tobiashieta, but would it be possible to do a “bug fixing only” software version of 1.14.(2?) that does not leave my PMS servers only partly usable?
This would mean that you would need to keep that (not yet) “old” development System alive for a couple of moments and that you would need to invest some ressources in this (let’s call it customer care), but it would help me (and others) to stay with Plex and not drop it because it’s buggy. This buys me time to find a suitable a sustainable long-term solution within Plex universe. Right now… 0 of 4 recordings today worked with Plex DVR (after two of them, I restarted the Server).
I kindly ask you to support this idea. I know that the idea was to not update 1.14 and fully fix the 1.15 instead (and therefore we had a Long time without a PMS release). But maybe you can find a way to find a compromise like this. Thank you for thinking about it.
@rossinior I am sorry if we got off on the wrong foot on this thread as that was not my intent. Also just to clarify, I do not work for either QNAP or Plex. I have a “day job” and do this on my personal free time, between work, spending time with my family, etc.
While I TRY (and obviously have failed in this case) to be of assistance to users as much as possible, people such as @ChuckPa & @tobiashieta (Plex Employees) are the only ones who can speak on behalf of Plex as a company. So hopefully that clarifies that I am not the “software developer”.
@ChuckPa had already said that Plex would likely not be compiling a custom libc version. You had said “no announcement has been made that these SERVERS will be discontinued”.
Since this is a PLEX forum, I offered the link to the QNAP forums which listed the QTS EOL date (which is where the libc update would be most likely be derived through). I made no mention of the security update dates as that wasn’t relevant to the Plex issue we were discussing.
As @tobiashieta also stated, this likely wasn’t the answer that you wanted to hear, but it is unfortunately just the reality of the situation.
My offering of the Nvidia Shield TV as an option was to try and give you a mechanism to continue to get the most current updates to Plex (such as v1.15.x) and also continue to use your the significant investments in your QNAPs.
If you already have a PC that is sufficiently powerful, that is another great option with little to no investment needed. That isn’t always the case for many people.
Again I am sorry that we got off on the wrong foot, and am glad that @ChuckPa is able to give you the type of support your are looking for.
After re-downgrading, my DVR is no longer working at all.
I opened a new thread for that, but you know the history of this… can you please try and help me?
