How can I configure a MAC address for WOL (Wake On LAN) in the Roku Plex app?
A Plex media server is far too expensive a machine to run continuously, and the technology to wake a Plex media server on demand has existed longer than Plex, so where can I configure that?
Hopefully, it provides a field to specify the server’s MAC address and a broadcast address e.g., 192.168.1.255. Where is that?
I know I can add more boxes (wrt, pfsense, etc) to catch access attempts via iptables, and use that to send a WOL packet. That’s not an answer: that’s a kluge for something that should just be there.
There is no Plex WOL feature in any proprietary client.
Plex servers are by design supposed to be reachable from anywhere at anytime for you and anyone you may share with.
As frustrating as that may be for you if you are the only person to use it, I don’t expect the feature ever being added.
The purpose of WOL is to make a server always available, but saving energy (a limited resource) when no one needs its services. Your car is always available but I doubt you leave it running 24 hours a day.
99.999% of people have no idea what WOL is, else there would be public outcry, angry mobs, pitchforks, torches, CNN reporters, hippies … GreenPeace.
Every NAS device does WOL routinely (though differently). It’s the primary reason they’re reliable devices, as their wear and tear is reduced dramatically.
Rarflix did WOL, but it no longer seems to work. Maybe a poll of Plex users would help: “Would saving 90% of the ongoing operational cost of running a Plex server be an attractive feature?”
That is at best a specious analogy, A car in no way resembles a server as the amount of energy, even as a percentage, saved is not even close by several orders of magnitude.
“Dramatically”?? your definition of dramatically must be dramatically different from mine and most other people’s I know.
Also the act of spinning up and down hard drives serves to shorten their lives and that has a larger economic impact than the small savings derived from not keeping them running 24/7.
Polls are useless unless there is some way of assuring that the respondents truly offer a representative sample of the population being sampled. Also your choice of 90% is HIGHLY debatable. I would place it at no more than 5-8%
I, for one, do not want Plex wasting their time on what I believe is a unneeded and unwanted feature. For me even the features that I will never use, like VR, are much more important than WOL.
I have to agree with @Elijah_Baley that you do not want to be using WOL for a server. A server is meant to be available and WOL would actually be counter intuitive to that.
As @Elijah_Baley also mentioned, spinning up and down drives constantly will lead to shorter lifespans of the drives while getting you little overall performance gains.
If you’re worried about the amount of power being consumed perhaps you need to look at building a new lower power server or Plex might not be the right solution for you.
Above what all else has already been said in reply to you, since WOL is 100% local only, I’d hate to try to access my server remotely and not be able to wake it.
Maybe I’m fortunate for where I live, but my UPS software states I average 80 cents a day for several devices connected to it - my Plex machine (4 drives), my QNAP NAS (4 drives of 6), my 8 port switch, my cable modem, and my router. (My UPS software indeed has a spot for me to fill in KWH)
Sure, that adds up over time, but as I’m now paying much less monthly after switching to all LED bulbs (a costly investment, that has almost paid itself off), my remote enjoyment of Plex is worth it.
WOL is indeed local-only, and that is exactly how I (and many/most others) use Plex.
That being said, a remote client can easily access a sleeping local server since even inexpensive routers can wake a sleeping server using an iptable rule. There are many articles about that, and for good reason.
A server capable of transcoding multiple HD or QHD streams will cost several dollars a day to run if we’re only talking about electricity and not the inevitable heat related component failures of any computing device. If that server is constantly streaming, then that’s cheap. If it is idle for 20 hours/day (as many Plex servers are), then that is not cheap at all.
My own server is an old Sandy Bridge based i7 box with 32GiB of RAM and a standard metric boatload of disk drives. It draws 1100 watts (nom) when streaming, 780 watts when idle, and less than 1 watt when sleeping. It takes 3 full seconds to wake up and respond.
It might go four days without anyone accessing it, then run constantly for a day or two. That will consume 75 KWh of energy to save 3 seconds over a four day span. Then there’s the wear/tear consideration: that also subtracts four days from the server’s lifespan, just thrown away in order to save those same 3 seconds/75KWh. Dealing with one disk drive failure obliterates the cumulative time savings.
No one is suggesting spinning disks up/down constantly. Most suspend plans won’t spin down anything unless an hour or two of idle is detected. Modern drives suffer no ill effects from such treatment, and truly modern disk drives (SSD, m2, etc) benefit greatly from it.
I seem to have touched some extremely sensitive nerves with my question, and that was not my intent. I certainly understand that this is a topic that only software and hardware engineers will care two shakes about. For the record, I really like Plex, but this is That One Thing I’d Change if the client code were Open Source.
You sound technically proficient enough to design your own WOL solution.
I’m pretty sure the Roku calls home to plex.tv when attempting to play media. Perhaps you could monitor for that or another call (undetermined at this time, but perhaps a netshark could tell) and wake the server up.
Back to the original question -
Fact - Plex Roku does not contain a WOL feature.
Opinion - I’m 95% confident that Plex will not add WOL to any of their proprietary clients. As you stated, a majority of the Plex user base has no clue how to use WOL, even if they were told what it is.
Not at all “sensitive” in the usual sense of the word but I am “sensitive” to the real lack of savings that allowing a server to sleep represents when taking all the costs into account and to the waste of time that building such a feature into Plex would cause.
Servers should never “sleep” as one of the features of a server is to be always available.
Also no drive 'benefits" from any form of power cycling. In fact the thermal stress is as great or greater than the spin up/down problems themselves.
If such a feature could be turned off and defaulted to off then I, and probably most everyone else, would/should have no objection to it. My objection is mostly to the waste of time implementing and testing such a feature would entail. Plex has MUCH better and more useful features to work on.
Yes. I can add yet another router between streaming clients and the server. I’m trying to do the smart thing without added complexity, and the smart thing is to bury a WOL configuration screen in the Plex channel’s Settings/Advanced/Super-Advanced-Keep-Out section. As for capturing phone-home packets to plex.tv, I already looked at that: there’s a m/l steady stream of phone-home traffic, and life is too short.
I read the linked thread before posting. The “Plex Classic” Roku channel (aka Rarflix) used to work when sideloaded in dev mode. It no longer appears to, and will require a significant development effort to fix. Also, Roku appears to ban any channels that do WOL, including the old popular WOL channel, presumably because such applications don’t limit their packet broadcast to the local subnet, which is extremely bad form.
Thank you again for the discussion, and be well. If this ever bugs me enough, I’ll put together a team, and compete for subscriptions. ;o)
If you don’t immediately grasp the savings, it’s likely because you’re not an engineer. This is a major consideration for every OS and every hardware platform in current development, and has been for several years. It’s the difference between a server that lasts 4 years and burns $2000 worth of electricity between failures and a server that lasts 50 years between failures and uses (comparable) electricity only when it’s doing something.
I could add this to a Roku channel in one day, including testing. I could add it to the Android client in two days with testing. Web clients can already do it via a simple redirect (I can provide details for anyone who’s interested).
Giblet535, I am not tech savy at all but would love to have this access through the Plex Roku App. I considered it a personal success to setup an old i7 desktop with the OMV/Debian OS on an SSD and then do a mirrored RAID 1 configuration on (2) 4tb HDD. I have the WOL Features enabled in Bios, however I have maxed out my tech skills at this level.
I think a lot of people would like it. It doesn’t have to be complicated at the user end (it can be completely automated on most devices).
The device (Roku, TV, Android TV, etc) already knows the MAC address and subnet mask of the servers it has discovered. It can store those in the Roku registry, and throw a magic packet at them from a timer. There doesn’t even need to be a configuration option for this
The problem (I think) will be getting past some outdated thinking by those who drive product design. I know what a stodgy lot they can be. I’ve seen some of that in this discussion, like the Olde Wive’s Tale that disk drives should be power cycled as little as possible.
But there are, of course, other considerations that I didn’t mention e.g., even if a younger developer sees value in this idea, the tech support team might shoot it down due to the complexity of diagnosing WOL on someone’s (remote) cobbled-together LAN. I’d be perfectly happy waiving tech support for such a feature (or I’d simply refrain from listin it as a feature).
It’s a valid analogy, nonetheless. Hyperbole is called for whenever a strong idea collides with box-think “Oh, this is the way we’ve always done X, and I see no reason to blah blah.” Box-think. Insouciance if you prefer.
I’m not going to operate an $1800 server, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, just so that I can spare someone 3 seconds of boot time once per day. I’m not alone. Roku appears to have pulled all the Wake On LAN channels, presumably because ROKU’s SDK doesn’t provide a way to determine the device’s broadcast address, so Roku assumes (possibly rightly) that developers will use ff.ff.ff.ff, which will work, but can be bad.
I built the RarPlex Roku client and uploaded that to my Roku devices. It no longer works with PMS, but its WOL configuration guarantees that I can send a magic packet on the LAN segment when it starts. I altered RarPlex so that it starts, sends WOL if that is configured, presents the Settings option for 5 seconds, then exits. Interesting that the first Roku Plex client devs thought WOL was useful and provided for it.
I added a script on my router that, once per day, enumerates all of Plex.tv’s IP addresses, and saves those in a text file. Another script creates iptables rules to log any access to Plex.tv with the topic BOXTHINK. Yet another script monitors that log, and when new BOXTHINK entries appear, it sends a magic packet to my Plex server. My Plex server runs a script that monitors several aspects of the server to determine whether it is in use and, if it has been idle for 30 minutes, puts the server to sleep.
Problem is, Plex clients don’t always phone home, so the server doesn’t wake up, and the Roku Plex channel comes up with its missing server screen. When that happens (6 tries in 10), I call my modified RarPlex channel, wait for it to exit, then start Plex again.
I’ll be happy to share my scripts if anyone wants them.
I waited. I haven’t written an article for LifeHacker, Consumer Reports, or CNet yet because I’m pretty sure someone at Plex will think through the typical customer use-cases and conclude that energy savings is important to at least some customers, and someone will notice that Plex actually spent money to REMOVE WOL support from its current Roku player, which is apparently based on RarPlex. And no, Elijah, I don’t care how you use Plex, or how you think it should be used, because you clearly constrain your thoughts to preconceived thought-snippets. I only care if you have constructive input on the question I asked.
Since you wish to have constructive answers, on Elijah_Bailey’s behalf, here, let me answer for you.
You can’t currently, and Plex doesn’t release development timelines to know if it ever will.
There is no location to configure this on any Plex, Inc supported Plex client (I’m aware of).
No-where. There is no location to configure this on any Plex, Inc supported Plex client (I’m aware of).
Any additional discussion is opinion and possible hyper-bole.
That being said, for all the time and trouble you’ve spent sitting in front of a electronics screen figuring out how to get this feature working may have been better spent getting up and walking to the server closet and tapping the power button or console keyboard to waken the machine.
I know if I did that I’d be much healthier just for the extra steps alone.
Your (apparent sounding) frustration with the lack of this feature reminds me of my grandfather who would keep the TV on a channel he hated because he couldn’t find the remote, and didn’t want to get up to manually adjust the TV.
Thank you, JamminR, for confirming that no Plex, Inc supported clients support the energy saving features standard on every server or client system on which they run. I’m so glad to hear that you enjoy a standard of living that precludes concern over trifles like operating costs. It’s great that some are so fortunate. I have to budget my expenses, take care of possessions, and manage other concerns that I don’t expect someone as wealthy as you to understand.
It’s also nice that you remember your grandfather, but insulting or belittling your own family in front of complete strangers to boost your perceived status in a forum doesn’t leave the impression you likely intended. Quite the opposite.
The confirmation was constructive, and you went to no small effort to respond, so thanks.
Considering the wake on lan of the server, the server would have to wake itself for tv recording.
In case of no recording planned for some time, the server would have to wake up to scan tv program to detect if there is a serie or something to record that was out of sight at last boot.
All this to says that this feature requires other features, scheduled boot.
I have no experiment in setting this up, but it could be requiring high OS privileges, which I would not provide to Plex server app.
At this point, i am wondering if a workaround solution could reside within a mindset of having a “watcher” on your network that mimic the Plex API and looks like a server (raspberry pie like). I believe that the Roku Plex client app check if it can connect to all configured server when starting… so that small server would be connected to the world and wake up the other one when “ping”.
That assume the call is different to know if the server is running VS just behind connected to public Plex.
That side server could take care of schedule boot of the costy server…
I am More brainstorming then giving real solution… but personnally, having “shutdown if not used” and a boot schedule in the bios could be an first step to save some operation cost.
Unfortunately, Roku Plex does not always contact plex.tv. It would be great if it did, but it doesn’t. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to be m/l random. Watching for that is extremely easy from a firewall. A simple iptable rule to log any access to plex.tv IP addresses, plus a log watcher command to send WOL whenever a log entry appears.
It’s also easy to have the same firewall wake up the Plex server to check for DVR tasks. I’d only have to add a 5-line script to pull DVR tasks from Plex, and translate those to appropriate “at” commands on the firewall.
The only glitch I know of is the WoL issue. I wrote a quick Android widget to send a WoL packet when I tap the widget, but that’s a pretty weird thing to have to do for functionality that’s likely only commented out in two files of the Roku app.
Ideal is if Plex apps provide WoL configuration like the rarflix app does.
My server was on for about 14 hours in October. Everyone else’s server was on for 744 hours in October. If their server lasts until November of 2020 before needing parts, then mine should last until sometime in April of 2124 and I’ll have saved enough electricity to power NASA for at least 20 minutes.
I would actually like to see this feature. My server is in my basement, and does not get a lot of use. Some sort of WOL would be very much appreciated.
EDIT:
I would be happy to make something work whether or not its initiated inside the client.
