New Plugin Available: Plex Media Server!

[joeschmuck]

Personally, I bought a PlexPass membership for two reasons: Chromecast support and supporting what I think is a very good product.

You speak the way I use to when I had money, ah the days I remember them well. Crap that was only a few years ago and I miss them terribly. Oh, I thought Chromecast would be a nice thing to purchase for $35 and the BestBuy guy sold me on it quickly. Got it home and found out I needed some sort of smart device to make the damn thing work or a laptop computer (borrowed my wife's), it didn't come with a remote control. It's now collecting dust. It's a great idea if you have all the cool gadgets. Maybe I'll re-gift it to a younger friend who can use it.

Seriously, I'm glad there are people out there who can support great products like Plex and Google Chromecast.

 

[Magnus33]

so you're basically just updating the version of plex that's running inside the prepackaged PBI with the latest version released on Plex's official site.
if so, awesome, as you just answered the question i was about to post :)

The programers haven't been able to get a surefire method yet for updating and yet doing this did just that in seconds..lol.
Somedays answers come out of left field when you least expect them.:)

 

[BatterseaPS]

Sweet. Now, as a noob, I just have to figure out how to upgrade FreeNAS without losing my settings.

Pretty easy. First of all just wait for the Release version to be available (i think it would be in the near future).
Save your settings from the GUI (just in case) and upgrade through the GUI to the Release version.
If the Plex issue is fixed then you will be able to upgrade Plex Plugin.

I did this and now I can't start the samba demon (the shell says configuration file doesn't exist). Also, the web GUI can't be accessed. Connecting to the IP address just times out, both on http and https.

Strangely, the Plex jail still works and I can play stuff off the server, but I can't add to it since there's no Windows share anymore.

And I'm kind of lost without the GUI since my command line knowledge is rudimentary at best and in the case of FreeBSD, nonexistent.

 

[Magnus33]

The update is not turning of the plex jail so updating is failing it seems.

 

[BatterseaPS]

The update is not turning of the plex jail so updating is failing it seems.

Sorry. I'm typing from my phone and didn't tell the whole story.

I got it to boot into GUI once, but that was after running a clean install. I tried reloading my backed up settings and that killed the GUI again.

So I just remounted by existing volumes and set up Plex again. I could not get Windows Share service to start so I rebooted and lost the GUI, and still can't start the Windows Share service (samba daemon through the shell won't start because of missing configuration file).

 

[G-Low]

Hi everyone,
I have a question about plex and freenas. I a´m relatively new to freenas so my question may be not the smartest one :)
I want to set up a HP Microserver with FreeNas booting from a USB pen drive with 4GB. As I know plex is downloading covers, descriptions and so on and store it somewhere. My question is, where does plex store all the stuff? On the Hard drives where the movie files are located? On the USB pen drive? Thanks for any help!

 

[crumbz]

Hi everyone,
I have a question about plex and freenas. I a´m relatively new to freenas so my question may be not the smartest one :)
I want to set up a HP Microserver with FreeNas booting from a USB pen drive with 4GB. As I know plex is downloading covers, descriptions and so on and store it somewhere. My question is, where does plex store all the stuff? On the Hard drives where the movie files are located? On the USB pen drive? Thanks for any help!

You don't specify where you are planning to run your Plex Media Server.

The PMS plugin for FreeNAS requires a jail. The data that PMS generates/gathers is stored within that jail. Where that jail is located is up to you (the only requirement is that it's an ZFS volume).

 

[G-Low]

Thanks crumbz for the quick reply.
I was planning not to use a ZFS file system. As I just planned to go with single drives without any raid, I thought UFS would be the better choice for me so I could keep my 4GB RAM and don´t buy additional. So what you are telling me is that when I set up my NAS I can only "install" PMS on a jail created on one of the HDDs, which I want to use to store my Data? I can not install anything on the USB stick, where I located the freenas img file?

 

[cyberjock]

That's exactly what he's saying. This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone since it's discussed in the manual. And you did read the manual before posting, right?

 

[G-Low]

OK, thanks for the support. And no, I did not read the manual, as I thought it would be easier to ask the smart people here, who could know the answer already.

 

[cyberjock]

OK, thanks for the support. And no, I did not read the manual, as I thought it would be easier to ask the smart people here, who could know the answer already.

Yeah.. you'll find yourself ignored quickly if you take that stance. We have little tolerance for people that can't read all of the documentation we've spent years putting together so you wouldn't have to ask the same questions that the 1000s of people before you have asked. ;)

 

[rjgould]

Plex is worth purchasing if you can afford it. They got a PlexPass out of me specifically because I was one of many who requested that they get Plex working on *BSD so that it could run on FreeNAS and they then went and did just that.

 

[ppmax]

Hi--quick question here: I recently upgraded my FreeNAS box to the latest release, then upgraded to the latest PMS via the Plugins update button...which never finished...so I nuke and paved and started fresh with a new jail, new PMS install, etc. I've added my mount points, PMS has scanned my media and I can play movies...but none of the Media Info seems to have been scanned by PMS, and I have seen a ton of messages in my log file that the plex scanner exited with signal 11 (I think, not near my system right now).

Anyone seeing anything else like this?

Also, is there an alternative method to upgrading PMS instead of using the FreeNAS Plugins/Installed/Upgrade button/GUI? I've done that a few times now and it never seems to complete, and I just end up starting over again.

Also, does anyone know the complete path to the Plex Media Scanner? I'd like to do some debugging and can't seem to find this little bugger:
https://plexapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201242707-Plex-Media-Scanner-via-Command-Line

thx much--
PP

 

[GaiusBaltar]

Also, is there an alternative method to upgrading PMS instead of using the FreeNAS Plugins/Installed/Upgrade button/GUI? I've done that a few times now and it never seems to complete, and I just end up starting over again.

thx much--
PP

this manual method was discussed and confirmed to work by others (including myself) earlier in this thread (post #140):

To throw my 2 cents in.

I run the plex plugin (two copies actually) and when the plex pass bsd version is updated I download it and replace the plexmediaserver binary folder like this:

Code:

# cd /usr/pbi/plexmediaserver-amd64/share/
# wget http://address.copied.from.plex.pass.bsd.download.link
# tar -xjvf ./PlexMediaServer-0.9.downloaded.version.tar.bz2
# service plexmediaserver stop
# mv ./plexmediaserver/ ./plexmediaserver.old/
# mv ./PlexMediaServer-0.9.downloaded.version/ ./plexmediaserver/
# service plexmediaserver start

I've been doing this for some time now and have not had any trouble with this method.

Take with grain of salt. Always back up your data. Get regular exercise. Call you mother.

the plugin version in the plex gui will still be at the older version and the updata button will still be there for the pbi, but plex will now be up-to-date.

 

[ppmax]

Gah--thanks for that and sorry I missed it...on the previous page lol.

I think I'm going to nuke and pave again...All my media metadata is correct (thumbs, actors, plot, etc) but I can't get PMS to analyze any of my media...so there is no metadata about resolution, format, bitrate, etc...

thx again,
PP

 

[ppmax]

I just did the nuke and pave and apparently the PMS analyzer isn't working or has changed from the previous release that I had.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing. As you can see there is no data showing resolution, track data, etc. Is there a way to download the previous release of this plugin?

Im also getting SIGSEGV faults in my console logs:
Feb 27 18:12:26 freenas kernel: pid 44745 (Plex Media Scanner), uid 972: exited on signal 11

 

[ppmax]

I discovered something weird...I have a bunch of movies encoded with a bunch of random software...all my Home Movies have all the resolution, tracks metadata that many of my Movies is missing (like the screenshot above). Here's the weird thing: almost all my movies were remuxed and optimized by Subler. By chance I remixed a movie with iFlicks last night and all the metadata shows on this movie, but none of the Subler remuxed movies.

Since I know this data was there in a previous release of the FreeNAS PMS plug-in, it seems something has changed in this release. I tried rescanning my Movies library with another agent, because a different agent was used in my Home Movies library--and those movies have all the metadata I'm missing. But no dice--changing scanners didn't change the outcome...no movie metadata.

Any suggestions? Anyone want to try and repro?

thx
PP

 

[zfrank]

There is a security-problem with plex < 9.9.3


http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Feb/270

 

[ppmax]

For what it's worth I trashed the FreeNAS PMS plugin and created my own ports jail and installed PMS that way. The issues I was having must have been specific to that particular version, since PMS Version 0.9.9.4 via FreshPorts works flawlessly. It also seems quite a bit faster, though I don't know if this is due to the newer version of PMS or running it inside a ports jail.

Another benefit of the ports jail is that it appears that upgrades will be much easier.

PP

 

[jkh]

There is a security-problem with plex < 9.9.3

It's updated now.