Sharing a Plex Server - multiple PlexPass users

General Discussions
1

So my buddies and I each have plex servers at home under our own PlexPass accounts, but we recently decided to pool our resources and build a centrally hosted server that we could all store our media on and share. This works pretty well with a few caveats:

  • We have to use one of our PlexPass accounts so administration can’t be shared
  • We would still like to sync content from the central server to our home servers for “offline” viewing (our home internet can sometimes be flaky, so we’d really like the ability to host content locally, that was synced from the central server)

Has anyone run into a similar situation and have any helpful advice?

2

@zanewbuxton said:

  • We have to use one of our PlexPass accounts so administration can’t be shared

This one you’re stuck with.

  • We would still like to sync content from the central server to our home servers for “offline” viewing (our home internet can sometimes be flaky, so we’d really like the ability to host content locally, that was synced from the central server)

You may give a Sync program like Resilio a try. You would set it up on the server and have it monitor your Movies and TV folders on the server and then you and your friends would have the matching key which you would use on your home server to mirror the central server’s content library. If you don’t want ALL of the central server’s content, then just setup an empty folder on the server for each of you where you can hardlink/copy content to and it would then sync to you (or your friend’s) home server. Once sync’d with your home, delete the copy/link from the central server’s folder.

3

What you’re describing for desired functionality fits really well with what Plex Cloud will be when finally released (currently in closed beta).

PMS, as it currently stands, as you’ve noticed, is intended for home use. It’s been extended to support Cloud Sync (a pseudo-server) in the cloud but not a full fledged server. Plex Cloud is that full server.

Plex Home, one feature of Plex Pass, allows one person to administer everything and provides that offline sync capability.

It’s not know if the developers will add the ability for others to administer your Plex Cloud. They are very cautious with the concept of personal versus commercial. Having a Plex Cloud server and multiple administrators sounds really commercial even to me.

You might be able to write to Plex directly and ask if there’s something they can do with transferring /joining / creating a new Plex Pass account. The only caveat would still be… there would be one administrator… however you each could be a member of the “Plex Home” and thereby get all the privileges of the Plex Pass (sync, etc)… Would this cover your needs?

4

@zanewbuxton
@ChuckPa

This is such a fringe use case this is the LAST thing plex needs to work on… basic functionality of the front and back end are still in desperate need of repair

A working PMP should be priority number 1 while ensuring mobile apps and the backend server can at least all talk to one another … which is still broken

Add to that regular sync is still not a fully baked and working solution

As for being constructive to your particular issues…

As others have said… a third party sync solution depending on how many different platforms you plex servers are running on would be the best way to go

VPN likely too slow so that means punching holes in your firewall and using programs like syncover or something else that is good at incremental, off site backup and cloning would be the answer.

Set nightly sessions where each server has its own time slot to avoid resource bottlenecks… everyone should sync content forward to a central server first and only download content from that one server so you are looking at 2 sync events for each outlying server … a push up and a pull down…

5

@zanewbuxton said:
So my buddies and I each have plex servers at home under our own PlexPass accounts, but we recently decided to pool our resources and build a centrally hosted server that we could all store our media on and share. This works pretty well with a few caveats:

  • We have to use one of our PlexPass accounts so administration can’t be shared

Why, exactly, do you feel you need PlexPass on the server? What functionality are you using that wouldn’t be available if you were to use a free account for the server and a PlexPass on the client? Most PlexPass features are client-side.

  • We would still like to sync content from the central server to our home servers for “offline” viewing (our home internet can sometimes be flaky, so we’d really like the ability to host content locally, that was synced from the central server)

It depends on what you want to sync to the home servers. If you want to sync everything, and you are on a Linux (or one of the other *nix platforms for which the binaries are available), you could achieve this very easily using rsync (or zfs send|receive if you have ZFS on both sides). You could cron it or do it asynchronously in realtime using lsyncd.

If you want to hoard files selectively, this is exactly what Plex Sync is for, but this is server → client, not server → server. Unfortunately, due to a capability detection bug and lack of DirectPlay forcing for sync, your server will almost certainly decide to transcode everything (yes, it’ll transcode h264/aac to h264/aac) in preparation for your syncing, which means that syncing is going to take forever if you are syncing a non-trivial amount of data.

6

@gordan79 said:

Most PlexPass features are client-side.

I’m sorry, but WHAT???

MOST Pass features are SERVER side. Right off the top of my head I can’t think of ANY Pass features on the CLIENT side that doesn’t require Plex Pass on the server. Fast user switching requires the SERVER to have a Home set up. Trailers and other features require the server you stream from to be a Pass server. Synch requires a Pass server as well. Premium music, also Pass. Cloud Sync, Lyrics, Parental Controls, Camera Uploads all require a Plex Pass on the server side.

All of these features require the account on the client side be signed in as a Pass User or as a Managed Home user of a Pass account or you are accessing a Pass enabled server. They are in most of the client apps (that support the features.) but disabled unless the main server account is a Pass account.

So, come to think of it NONE of the features of a Plex Pass are CLIENT side. They are all dependent on a SERVER side account being Pass in order for the features to be enabled on the client.

Right now syncing from one server to another loses all Watched status for the desired episode/movies. Since the DB is in a SQLite format, it can’t be read/written to by more than one process. Using rsync can get the media, but you don’t get your progress or watch status. (Or personal ratings, custom posters/artwork, etc.) So even this idea is flawed to a great extent.

Transcoding everything through sync? Hate to say it, but I think you are wrong here, too… If you set up an Optimized Media job to support one of the bitrates already set up for syncing for all of your media, when you request something to be synced Plex will use the OM version of the media to the client device. At least it has in all of my testing using this feature.

To the OP and his friend: As much as the idea sounds great, Plex Media Server is just not ready for this type of activity yet. There are way to many features missing to make this type of functionality a reality. (most of these have Feature Requests already) I suggest you find the relevant posts in the Feature Request forum and add your vote by placing a “Like” on the first post of each thread. The more votes we get in some of the features, perhaps the sooner the Plex Team realizes the users are demanding some of them.

As @dragonmel states in his reply, this is a fringe request and involves a number of other feature requests. Rsync (or similar solutions) is probably the BEST way to get at least partial functionality, but not the entire answer either. Keep in mind, being a member of someone else’s Home means you forfeit the rights of administering your own server to the owner of the Home…

7

What really boggles my noodle… is if they are all syncing the central servers content to their own… why watch the content off the central server wasting bandwidth and reducing the overall experaince

Just play it local?

If they are good friends … then I would sync it though Plex at all…
So you misunderstand me

SSH, FTP whatever between servers an pull the FILES not a plex item between servers.

If you have the content locally I wouldn’t dick with trying to be on everyone’s Plex server … just pull the raw content into YOUR server and be done with it… then it will have your watch statistics etc

My 2 cents

8

@MikeG6.5 said:

@gordan79 said:

Most PlexPass features are client-side.

So, come to think of it NONE of the features of a Plex Pass are CLIENT side. They are all dependent on a SERVER side account being Pass in order for the features to be enabled on the client.

Perhaps it is both, then, because my wife cannot use her own account to sync data down to her Android device, even though the server account is Plex Pass enabled. Are you saying that should work?

Right now syncing from one server to another loses all Watched status for the desired episode/movies. Since the DB is in a SQLite format, it can’t be read/written to by more than one process. Using rsync can get the media, but you don’t get your progress or watch status. (Or personal ratings, custom posters/artwork, etc.) So even this idea is flawed to a great extent.

I’m pretty sure posters and artwork are just files in the same folder as the main movie file, e.g.:
Movie (2000).mp4
Movie (2000)-1.jpg
Movie (2000)-2.jpg

etc.

As for the SQLite watch progress info, let’s face it, that’s not exactly a huge deal. As long as the media files are named appropriately, the metadata will get pulled down by the target server just fine.

Transcoding everything through sync? Hate to say it, but I think you are wrong here, too… If you set up an Optimized Media job to support one of the bitrates already set up for syncing for all of your media, when you request something to be synced Plex will use the OM version of the media to the client device. At least it has in all of my testing using this feature.

And that is also what I DON’T WANT. I want the files that can be DirectPlayed to sync without transcoding or other optimization. I don’t want my server to be doing any transcoding. Under any circumstances. Ever. I went through the pain of transcoding all my media statically into H.264/AAC/MP4. This was in part because at the time I was running on an ARM server that was never going to have enough CPU to transcode any meaningful amount of data in an even remotely practical time. Bottom line is that I spent a workstation-year of CPU time and energy converting my entire DVD and BR collection (6500 files in total, and about 4.5TB) to the above format that I carefully tested to make sure it DirectPlays on all of my devices (Chromecast, Android, Firefox, Chrome). Yet when I select any of my media for sync to an Android device (couldn’t test it before I got a Plex Pass), I discovered that it decides that everything needs to be transcoded to - wait for it - H.264/AAC/MP4. Suffice to say that syncing my son’s cartoon collection (200GB SD card’s worth) to his Android slate for a holiday trip just isn’t going to happen in reasonable time or in a reasonable power budget, thus rendering the feature useless to me.

As @dragonmel states in his reply, this is a fringe request and involves a number of other feature requests. Rsync (or similar solutions) is probably the BEST way to get at least partial functionality, but not the entire answer either.

You could probably reasonably easily write something that extracts the watch status info from SQLite, but unless you are particularly desperate for this data it is probably not worth the effort.

9

Sure you can get the FILES moved over for posters, subs, etc. And some of them might even default. But my point is, if you have a certain poster for a movie on one server, rsync the library (or media) over, the odds are strong a custom poster isn’t going to be the one Plex selects on the second server.

For your wife to sync from the server with your Pass credentials on it, you have to turn on the setting on her user page. It’s not turned on by default. All Pass features are already built into most clients. Whether they can use them or not depends on if you have turned them on for the user and if you have the proper account type signed in on the server. If it’s NOT working then there is something else going on affecting it. It has always worked for me with every user I have ever enabled the feature for.

Optimize Media is a feature that you can set as a scheduled task. This means the server works on it when you aren’t normally using it. If you KNOW you want to sync something tomorrow, you can OM it today, so it runs at night, then sync the OM version over tomorrow. This is probably the most efficient way to use an underpowered CPU, including some of the ARM CPUs…

If you weren’t able to get your son’s cartoons synced it may very well have been because you weren’t aware that the OM Feature can be used this way. I know this works, as I have tested it extensively right after the feature came out. If it’s not working for you now, then the format set for the OM feature isn’t quite right. Time to tweak and test again. Before you rely on a feature you have to test it with enough time to make adjustments. Syncing it the night before the trip starts is too late.

For some people the Watched Status is more important than anything else. (Hence the requests for full Trakt integration, migrating Watched Status between servers and many more along this vein.) When I recently had to do a complete rebuild of my PMS machine due to some HDD failures, this was the one thing I missed the most. Maintaining my Watched Status for all of my users.

@gordan79 you are taking the time to make sure that the media is in the most Direct Playable format you can possibly make it. I applaud you for that effort. But in order to use sync you have to take things a bit further. You may even try writing a profile for the device (don’t ask me how, never had luck with this.) so DP items just get downloaded.

The one key point to remember about Plex: There are a lot of neat features built into it. But most of them require experimenting and testing to get them to work right. Few of them work as advertised straight out of the box for everyone.

10

@MikeG6.5 said:
Sure you can get the FILES moved over for posters, subs, etc. And some of them might even default. But my point is, if you have a certain poster for a movie on one server, rsync the library (or media) over, the odds are strong a custom poster isn’t going to be the one Plex selects on the second server.

It will if there’s only one. :slight_smile:

Optimize Media is a feature that you can set as a scheduled task. This means the server works on it when you aren’t normally using it. If you KNOW you want to sync something tomorrow, you can OM it today, so it runs at night, then sync the OM version over tomorrow. This is probably the most efficient way to use an underpowered CPU, including some of the ARM CPUs…

It’s still beyond impractical for large data volumes, though (the above mentioned figures is 4.5TB), in both the storage costs and the CPU time it’s going to take (a CPU-year was mentioned, presumably using the veryslow libx264 preset).

If you weren’t able to get your son’s cartoons synced it may very well have been because you weren’t aware that the OM Feature can be used this way. I know this works, as I have tested it extensively right after the feature came out. If it’s not working for you now, then the format set for the OM feature isn’t quite right. Time to tweak and test again. Before you rely on a feature you have to test it with enough time to make adjustments. Syncing it the night before the trip starts is too late.

A night before the trip may be too late, but having to start transcoding two weeks ahead (200GB / 4.5TB * 1 year) is similarly ridiculous, especially if the problem would be trivially solved by PMS simply obeying the “DirectPlay=Forced” option in the Android app settings instead of yet again insisting it knows better and yet again falling flat on it’s face.

@gordan79 you are taking the time to make sure that the media is in the most Direct Playable format you can possibly make it. I applaud you for that effort. But in order to use sync you have to take things a bit further. You may even try writing a profile for the device (don’t ask me how, never had luck with this.) so DP items just get downloaded.

All options mentioned are far more resource intensive, be it in terms of man-hours, CPU time or storage space (or a combination thereof) than simply making PMS obey the DP force flag when invoking sync. That would “just work” and make the entire problem go away.

11

Thanks everyone for your feedback. After more research, it seems like this is the closest thing I was looking to articulate the first time http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/101939/roku-3-use-roku-3-39-s-sd-card-or-usb-storage-for-plex-sync We don’t actually want to host servers at home - we just want to be able to watch content at home, without constant buffering.

12

You cannot sync to a Roku.