I signed up for the Plex Cloud invite about 8 hours after the program was released and still no invite. I have about 12TB of data already on Amazon drive and have been a lifetime member for several years but still nothing in my inbox. What gives Plex I’m about to just rent a online VM and mount my data storage to the machine to get the ball rolling instead of waiting forever. Anyone else going crazy waiting for the invite or am I the only one???
It will happen when it happens and not a second before.
Invites have gone out to a few folks and the testing shows that Plex Cloud is far from ready for extension into a larger pool. Plex Cloud is, at this point, more of an alpha test than a beta.
A short search will uncover a goodly number of threads already discussing this.
@Elijah_Baley said:
It will happen when it happens and not a second before.Invites have gone out to a few folks and the testing shows that Plex Cloud is far from ready for extension into a larger pool. Plex Cloud is, at this point, more of an alpha test than a beta.
A short search will uncover a goodly number of threads already discussing this.
Yeah I understand this but I’m what you call patient until a point and the beta test does seem very much like a alpha. I would like them to have a discussion group specifically for the Plex Cloud to inform the community about the progression and details on how they are implementing their cloud platform. I mostly interested in the cloud platform due to my lack of upload speed with Comcast business and always needing to have my plex server running. Shutting down my Plex server will save me about $40 a month in electricity which would be great!
@klwolf2000 said:
… I would like them to have a discussion group specifically for the Plex Cloud to inform the community about the progression and details on how they are implementing their cloud platform …
I understand how you feel but don’t hold your breath. There is a beta forum and although that one is open to beta testers only, nobody there is sworn to secrecy. The reason you are not hearing of any progression and details on implementation is very simply that there is no new information, period. The last official update was the 6th of October, heck, even unofficially nothing has been said except a request to be patient. I would love to see the floodgates open, both with updates and new testers, I’d probably even settle for a trickle in both cases, but neither seems to be happening at this moment. The testers are as much in the dark as everyone else. If it’s any comfort, even if you were a part of the beta right now there is no way you could switch off your server any time soon, because both playback and getting your media added are wonky as hell.
If you are desperate to add your media to Amazon Cloud you can start uploading though, you don’t need an invitation to Plex Cloud to do so.
This beta test, unlike all previous Plex beta testing, is based on resources. The resource limits versus issues (PMS internal and external) being resolved are what govern how quickly it progresses.
Not to throw Amazon under the bus but there is an issue which Plex is waiting on Amazon for. Also, at this stage of the beta, there are Amazon-imposed limits on what Plex Cloud can do. Trying to test within these limits is, how shall I say?, a challenge. Some PMS issues can’t be resolved fully until the external issues are resolved.
Those of us who are trying to test are just as, if not more, frustrated than those of you who are waiting to try it. We ALL want it to work and work right. The last thing any of us want is something “not ready for prime time”. Agreed?
Having a limit on your patience is completely understandable. Without repeating any of the good information already mention here, I will say that we are working on some key areas and hope to have news out as soon as we can. For some this will be a replacement to their in-home PMS, and for others in may just augment their setup. During the beta I would personally recommend that it doesn’t entirely replace your PMS, as others have mentioned. However, we do have our sights set on making this work really well so that the option can be yours. Hoping we’ll be able to include you in the beta ride, soon 
slightly off topic…Can one still sign up for the beta?
Thx a lot for your explanation @kinoCharlino
Hopefully more people will be invited soon (like me
@ChuckPa said:
The last thing any of us want is something “not ready for prime time”. Agreed?
Agreed!
@klwolf2000 said:
I signed up for the Plex Cloud invite about 8 hours after the program was released and still no invite. I have about 12TB of data already on Amazon drive and have been a lifetime member for several years but still nothing in my inbox. What gives Plex I’m about to just rent a online VM and mount my data storage to the machine to get the ball rolling instead of waiting forever. Anyone else going crazy waiting for the invite or am I the only one???
You probably made the mistake of being truthful about the amount of data and bandwidth you have.
Plex Cloud would be a great idea - if PMS wasn’t buggy as hell in it’s detection of when to transcode and when to DirectPlay. This drove me nuts for ages until they implemented a “Force DirectPlay” feature on Android, that thankfully carries over to anything being cast from Android to, say, a Chromecast.
The obvious solution to the entirely impractical amount of CPU that would be required to make every Plex Pass subscriber able to do realtime transcoding of their chaotically encoded pirated media is to make PlexCloud DirectPlay only. That would suit me just fine because 100% of my media is DVD (and more recently BR) extracts I transcoded myself to h264/aac because that is what everything supports.
Unfortunately, it’s still not plain sailing from there because some functionality is still broken. Specifically, PlexSync seems to detect all of my media as having to be transcoded to sync it to an Android device (despite the fact that it DirectPlays just fine, and more to the point, even if I set DP to “auto”, PMS detects that the media file can be DP-ed to the device, but when I try to sync the media to the device, it insists on transcoding it). So detection is being done in two places (bad software design), and in one place it’s broken.
This is almost certainly why Mobile Sync is currently not available on Plex Cloud (mentioned here: https://www.plex.tv/blog/book-plex-volume-3-plex-cloud/ ). They know it’s broken, and while they can happily ignore burning huge amount of users’ home servers’ CPU and energy, it’s easier to just switch the feature off than fix the bug when they’re paying for the said huge amount of CPU.
Personally, I saw Plex Cloud as purely a way of making transcoding detection bugs Plex’ problem. But given that it’s both unavailable, and the features that are the most problematic wouldn’t be available on it even if it were available, it seems like a waste of Plex Pass subscription.
@Caboaddict said:
slightly off topic…Can one still sign up for the beta?
Yes…
https://www.plex.tv/blog/book-plex-volume-3-plex-cloud/
about half way down the page is the sign up link 
Those that see Plex Cloud as the answer to their prayers had better look at things like Parental Controls and the lack of Blacklist controls for an idea of what to expect. (Or OM transcoding settings, Collections, or a slew of other half thought out/implemented “features” we currently don’t have, but have asked for repeatedly.)
“The last thing any of us want is something “not ready for prime time”. Agreed?” WHAT??? Is this a NEW policy the Plex Team is going to implement? Or is this just more wishful thinking? Hard to be positive with all of the “features” we supposedly have, but aren’t fully functional without some sort of workaround.
they should have tried the product internally (a beta between Plex employee). Like this is a joke
@MikeG6.5 said:
“The last thing any of us want is something “not ready for prime time”. Agreed?” WHAT??? Is this a NEW policy the Plex Team is going to implement? Or is this just more wishful thinking? Hard to be positive with all of the “features” we supposedly have, but aren’t fully functional without some sort of workaround.
^^^ This.
As much as I hate using the phrase “minimum viable product”, that really is what is need here. Tunnelling over SSH (Plex Relay) and un-neuterable capability auto-detection for transcoding really don’t seem like the way forward. Deleting Plex Relay and Plex Transcoder binaries only gets you so far without stubbing out whatever is calling them in the first place.
@claudio_roma said:
they should have tried the product internally (a beta between Plex employee). Like this is a joke
I completely agree. Why email all plex pass members and make a song and dance about it on the website if it isn’t ready?! This isn’t some film with a scheduled release date a year away. This is a product they released, told everyone if they’re interested to sign up and then said it’s extremely limited.
Most likely because they didn’t quite grasp just how resource intensive PMS’ transcoding is, and this is deemed a key feature because it panders to the average user who pirates content from questionable sources, leaving all of their content encoded in various different ways.
The one plausible group for whom Plex Cloud would just work are people who have converted their own content from legitimate sources to make it easier to consume via Chromecasts (and similar devices), but there are two problems with that:
- The fraction of such users is relatively small
- They are hindered by the fact that some features such as Plex Sync are still suffering significant capability auto-detection issues.
IMO, a preview of Plex Cloud should come with no transcoding capability at all. Everything should be forced to DirectPlay, both for playback and for sync (and thus sync shouldn’t be disabled as it is alleged to be at the moment), and content optimization should also be disabled. IMO, any and all transcoding should be excluded on Plex Cloud, simply because the resource requirements to have it enabled are simply too mind-bogglingly enormous.
If there is a need to ever support users with incompatibly encoded media on Plex Cloud, this should be done via a downloadable app (minimally wrapped ffmpeg + ACD client) that hooks up to the user’s Plex account (and the associated ACD), and goes and transcodes everything using the user’s own CPU to a universally supported format. I don’t see how anything else is ever going to workable.
@richardhanney said:
@claudio_roma said:
they should have tried the product internally (a beta between Plex employee). Like this is a jokeI completely agree. Why email all plex pass members and make a song and dance about it on the website if it isn’t ready?! This isn’t some film with a scheduled release date a year away. This is a product they released, told everyone if they’re interested to sign up and then said it’s extremely limited.
While I do think that Plex handled the announcement of the initial beta badly (actually EXTREMELY badly) I also think they were surprised by the Amazon problems involving load. (Rate limiting) I guess that in initial tests internally involving a number of Plex employees they did not run into the problem and believed that it would just be a matter of adding the missing features and fixing a few minor bugs during the beta. That would have made the beta reasonably short.
One thing I have learned is that hitting an unexpected problem after a beta starts can impact schedules and even prevent final release forcing the abandonment of a project. Plex’s failure, in this case, was not taking into account that “Sh#$ happens” and widely announcing the beta in the way they did assuming a short beta and making expectations too high. That was, pretty obviously to me, a HUGE mistake. It has cause a disproportionately negative view of the project and a LOT of negative feedback that could have been easily avoided by a much more limited approach and NOT making a premature general announcement. (Another case of Plex’s problem with “premature escalation.” )
Plex is, I am quite sure, pressing hard to get “Plex Cloud” operational but they are not in control of all aspects and do not have the resources to really force Amazon to put greater effort into solving the problems that “Plex Cloud” has uncovered at Amazon’s end. Amazon moves, at times, excruciatingly slowly and there is little that small companies or individuals can do to speed things up.
There could (I have no way of knowing this at all) even be a problem with the contract between Plex and Amazon it that the original contract called for “X” amount of resources to be consumed by each user and the actual tests as users are added are showing “Y” with “Y” much greater than “X” and Amazon is not willing to extend the agreement to cover the added load.
There are nearly always unpredictable problems when multiple entities must all perform well for a project to work well and when these problems happen if the cause one or more of the parties to have to perform outside the original contract it often results in delays.
Plex may not be in control of the issues that are causing the current delays.
As I said Plex’s mistake was in creating false expectations for the beta and the project as a whole in that they should have made it MUCH lower key but, at this point, they should COMMUNICATE with the users in general and own up to what the problems actually are and what is being done and they should even send out a followup email announcing the delay to everyone that was previously given to have false hopes.
Plex is NOT good with communication and this fiasco pretty much proves it.
@Elijah_Baley said:
Plex is NOT good with communication and this fiasco pretty much proves it.
While that is a part of the problem, the resource requirements to facilitate transcoding for everyone all the time were entirely predictable, not helped by sync’s insistance on transcoding everything most of the time on top.
@zan79 said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
Plex is NOT good with communication and this fiasco pretty much proves it.While that is a part of the problem, the resource requirements to facilitate transcoding for everyone all the time were entirely predictable, not helped by sync’s insistance on transcoding everything most of the time on top.
I do not think that rate limiting only impacts transcoding. I think that there are many other pieces that hit rate limiting problems. Also while the resource requirements of transcoding were and are predictable I do not think that Plex had much of a way to know how much it would impact the Amazon “rate limiting” feature.
That, of course, could also be a communication thing as Plex may not have correctly communicated how their app(s) would impact transfer rates and Amazon may not have correctly communicated how transfer rates would impact app performance. This is why good contracts often get so lengthy and convoluted. Everything must be spelled out in detail including “fringe” conditions.
Whine the problems may or may not have been avoidable the poor communication with Plex users was. Plex took an overoptimistic view of how development would proceed and they then communicated that view to their users and then, when they hit problems that they did not expect, the users have justifiably exhibited frustration.
For what it is worth I am in the beta and find that “Plex Cloud” is effectively unusable on all my devices (Rokus, Fire TV, Rasplex on Raspberry PI and various computers) except my Shield TV and even on the Shield it usually fails after playing two or three TV shows or one movie.
At this point it is FAR from ready for any expansion of the beta and nobody would want to use it for any general use.
I hope it progresses and becomes a viable option but the fact that it has set stagnant for so long during the beta without any meaningful communication from Plex does not bode well for the future of Plex Cloud."
Can you elaborate on what specific “rate limiting” is causing problems? There are a lot of various limits listed on AWS:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html
I would be interested to hear what limits you are actually hitting in your usage. Is your media transcoding or is everything DirectPlay? Since you are saying that Shield isn’t affected, I would hazard a guess that you are in fact encountering an issue related to transcoding being too much of a resource hog. Shield can handle almost any format so it DPs everything you have, but your other devices may well be more sensitive and require the server to do transcoding. Since this is insanely CPU intensive on the server side, you are probably running into whatever CPU quota they had to put in place to make the service at least usable for some people some of the time.
Which again goes back to my point earlier about Plex Cloud having any transcoding features being unworkable in any realistic scenario. Make it DP-only (playback and sync), and the problem will go away. The lack of transcoding will only affect people who didn’t encode their own content, or have done so with a poor choice of codec. That may well mean most users - but I just don’t see any other way it’s ever going to work.
To put the issue of transcoding into perspective, converting my entire DVD collection to H.264+AAC+MP4 burned through way more than £120 in electricity alone, on hardware worth a non-trivial 4-figure sum. Given Plex Pass lifetime membership costing £120 (or £60 if you were lucky enough to get it before the price went up), it doesn’t take a genius that a transcoding Plex Cloud based on AWS was never going to be economically viable, even without accounting for data growth. You might just about be able to make the video transcoding part viable using a custom farm of low end Nvidia cards (e.g. GT630) for NVENC functionality only, but no cloud provider supplies such a setup, which would in turn mean Plex maintaining their own private cloud. A farm of GT630 cards would have probably been able to do my transcode in maybe 1% of the power budget and 10% time, and the tradeoff in encoding quality may have been worth it (it produces similar bit rates and visual quality as the libx264 veryfast preset). Something like that might just make it viable, at a push. But it would still be way more expensive and complex than a DP-only approach.
