Backup and restore Plex

[ynk1121]

Version:
TrueNAS-13.0-U6.1

My Plex jail seems to have gotten messed up. It works fine when playing original files but transcoding is completely broken. Won't work for music or videos on any device. I figured just creating a new jail is the easiest way to go to fix it although I'm open to suggestions. Can anyone walk me through copying the Plex data from one jail to another like you are talking to a 5 year old? I tried searching and tons of people say where the info is located in the jail. They all are going on the assumption a person knows what to do with that information (which I don't).

 

[winnielinnie]

My Plex jail seems to have gotten messed up. It works fine when playing original files but transcoding is completely broken.

Can you elaborate on this?

Were you ever really using transcoding? If so, was it via the CPU, or did you leverage the GPU?

Did this issue only start after a TrueNAS Core update? a jail upgrade? a pkg update?

 

[ynk1121]

Can you elaborate on this?

Were you ever really using transcoding? If so, was it via the CPU, or did you leverage the GPU?

Did this issue only start after a TrueNAS Core update? a jail upgrade? a pkg update?

Yes, transcoding definitely was used and originally worked. It was the default CPU settings. Yes to all 3 of the last questions but I don't know after which the issue started.

I was on the last version of Truenas 12 for a while. Two weeks ago I finally changed over to 13 since I figure by U6 hopefully most the major bugs are squashed. Update seemed to go fine. Updated the plex plugin afterwards and it threw some error about updating (can't remember what). Google took me to updating the jail and pkg manually and that seemed to go fine.

I only use Plex when home so as far as I knew everything was working. It wasn't until a family member mentioned yesterday that some music wouldn't play outside the house did I realize what was happening. Basically any mp3 above 128kbps wouldn't play for her. Light bulb lit in my head that's exactly what the transcode setting was in the app. Changed the app to play at maximum bitrate always and everything played outside the home. Tried video and same story. On wifi when it's playing direct, it plays fine. When I switched to cellular where it would transcode it errors out.

 

[ynk1121]

I somehow managed to fix it so disregard the earlier questions. If anyone else has the same issues with transcoding in the future and find this thread, go to the jail tab on the left side of your Truesnas webpage, expand your Plex jail, click shell, type "pkg update -f" and press enter, then once that is totally done do "pkg upgrade -f" and press enter.

When I was not using -f it would say it's already the same version and do nothing. I'm guessing -f force replaces whats there? I don't know. Totally fixed all my issues though.

 

[winnielinnie]

You might be running on an older FreeBSD base "release" (in the jail), of which the "Plugin" never upgraded your release.

As it stands now: Don't use "Plugins" in Core. Use manually created/managed jails. (But we might only survive for about 2 more years like this, due to the future of Core.)

 

[ynk1121]

You might be running on an older FreeBSD base "release" (in the jail), of which the "Plugin" never upgraded your release.

As it stands now: Don't use "Plugins" in Core. Use manually created/managed jails. (But we might only survive for about 2 more years like this, due to the future of Core.)

Yeah, I went with the plugin before knowing any better. Once I had everything setup, I didn't want to mess with it trying to move it to a manually created jail or start it over since it was working fine.

I saw that thread. Very disappointing to read since Core has been ridiculously reliable. I think I had like a 150 day up time before the restart 2 weeks ago to move to version 13. The only reason for the previous restart was an update to get the last version of 12. Seems like it could stay running indefinitely without any issues.