Is Plex dead on FreeBSD?

[Jailer]

Sure looks like it to me. I've been following that thread over at the Plex forums. The devs have been skirting around providing an answer on the future of Plex on FreeBSD and some of the missing features. I recently saw one of the devs (don't remember who) mention some statistics that FreeBSD is a tiny fraction of the PMS user base and that FreeNAS comprised 90% of that user base. Elan confirms that it's FreeBSD user base is less than 1%.

With FreeNAS moving away from jails in favor of iohyve and Docker this pretty much puts a nail in the coffin for Plex on FreeBSD and Elan pretty much let it slip that's what they are leaning towards. I'm not one that's entirely convinced yet of the Docker craze and I'm really not thrilled about having to run Plex in a VM. If things pan out like they look to be I'll probably be sticking with FreeNAS 9.x for some time to come.

I know I'm in the minority on this but there has to be other users out there that feel similarly about it. What's your thoughts?

 

[SweetAndLow]

I'm not looking forward to running a boot2docker VM just so I can run a Plex docker container. I'm all for docker and understand it's application and I even use it for development. But I don't look forward to dealing with it's complexities in top of freenas. I think freebsd is a great platform for Plex but there are just so many Linux users when Plex makes decisions it clear which choice to make.

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[Zwck]

I have been running plex in a boot2docker container and its fairly easy to setup and runs fairly smooth. While docker is great, you still can run from a real VM, if you like.

Actually, i prefer the docker environment, especially if you a persistent storage config folder, you install pms in less then 2 minutes

 

[SweetAndLow]

I have been running plex in a boot2docker container and its fairly easy to setup and runs fairly smooth. While docker is great, you still can run from a real VM, if you like.

Actually, i prefer the docker environment, especially if you a persistent storage config folder, you install pms in less then 2 minutes

Lol docker on freebsd does use a real VM. How does it handle cores and memory usage? Bhyve is just to new and untested for me.

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[Zwck]

What I meant by that real vm comment is that you skip the docker layer within the Boot2docker vm.

And in regards to your question I am not sure how to gage this.

 

[Stux]

I would like to see some actual transcoding/plex benchmarks jail vs iohyve vs docker

If there's no performance issue, then I have no issue with it.

 

[Zwck]

I use a 6300, which has a passmark score of ~5500 which should handle 2 transcode which it does in docker.

That not much data :)

 

[Scareh]

I think it's clear with moving forward to vm/iohyve/docker freebsd plugin's plex will effectively cease to exist. When plex notices the% dropping even lower, or even when freenas 10 is annouced i think they'll effectively stop the freebsd support.
Why waste money and resources when an "effective" alternative is present?

On the case of vm's in freenas i can be short. I don't like it.
Why? if i wanted to run vm's i'd run them in my vm environment. I liked the plugins just because it was simple, easy to use. Update with 1 button.
THe vm's (during my trail with fn10) had a lot of overhead in my opinion.

While i'll wait for a few months to upgrade to 10 (to let other people iron out the bugs) i'll effectively move to 10 aswell eventually, and basicly will start using docker.

 

[Jailer]

While docker is great, you still can run from a real VM, if you like.

The problem with that is resources have to be allocated away from the file server for the VM whether they are being used or not. In a jail they only use system resources when needed.

 

[SweetAndLow]

The problem with that is resources have to be allocated away from the file server for the VM whether they are being used or not. In a jail they only use system resources when needed.

This is also the reason to switch. A runaway jail could tank your fileserver.

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[Jailer]

I would love to know how often this happens. I did some quick googling but didn't come up with much.

 

[Ericloewe]

Funny part is that, right now, bhyve VMs can become unkillable, apparently.

 

[Jailer]

I do want to point out that my post wasn't meant to sound like a complaint. I love what the Plex and FreeNAS and FreeBSD devs have done to bring all this awesome software to the masses in an easy to use form. My reason for posting was purely disappointment.

I'm very new to FreeBSD having only learned anything about it by finding FreeNAS a couple years ago. I love FreeBSD and would love to see it gain in popularity to the point that there could be a level of support that Linux sees or even surpass it. Software will come and go and I get that but watching something so popular drop support of FreeBSD is, as I pointed out earlier, disappointing.

 

[joeschmuck]

Hum, It could be that I will end up using FreeNAS solely as a NAS since I have a perfectly fine ESXi system running and can place my Plex on a Linux VM.

We shale see what happens when FreeNAS 10 comes out and how Plex can best be integrated.

 

[jkh]

Funny part is that, right now, bhyve VMs can become unkillable, apparently.

They can if you really get things stuck in the kernel, but it happens rarely. If it happens more often than rarely, or if it simply happens enough with enough users now using bhyve seriously in the heterogeneous workloads in which it tends to happen, I suspect the FreeBSD community will also track down the various ways in which bhyve(1) can get itself stuck in such a kernel resource rate and fix them. Either way, fixing ONE process that sometimes gets stuck is a lot easier than fixing any conceivable process that gets stuck or runs away while running in a jail, since the mere fact that it is running in a jail is not enough to really narrow down the problem space.

 

[danb35]

A runaway jail could tank your fileserver.

Been there, done that, several times, with an earlier version of PMS (around 2-3 years ago). Exhausted 32 GB of RAM and somewhere around 50 GB of swap before the server died and rebooted. It's much better now, fortunately.

 

[Glorious1]

I know this isn't a plex solution, but for just watching media on a TV, I have Kodi in a little box hooked to the TV and receiver via HDMI and optical audio out. My Kodi box is a mac mini, but it will run on just about anything. Kodi just streams the media from FreeNAS (I use NFS for that). It can handle any codecs and containers I throw at it. No jail, no VM.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I know this isn't a plex solution, but for just watching media on a TV, I have Kodi in a little box hooked to the TV and receiver via HDMI and optical audio out. My Kodi box is a mac mini, but it will run on just about anything. Kodi just streams the media from FreeNAS (I use NFS for that). It can handle any codecs and containers I throw at it. No jail, no VM.

How do you turn box on and off? What remote do you use? Does it auto start Kodi and has it ever not worked and needed messing around with. If it didn't work even a single time it's not a good workaround. My Plex clients always work.

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[Jailer]

Same here, I run a NUC on my main TV and run it with a Harmony remote. HD audio and ease of use a paramount to me.

Not sure where I stand with 10 yet. I have jails that I have to figure out what I want to do with and I haven't even begun to play with Docker. I may just stay with 9 for a while.

 

[Glorious1]

How do you turn box on and off? What remote do you use? Does it auto start Kodi and has it ever not worked and needed messing around with. If it didn't work even a single time it's not a good workaround. My Plex clients always work.

The box stays on, goes to sleep when not used. I'm not sure about other platforms, but the mac version of Kodi comes with a daemon or something that wakes the mac and starts Kodi when it receives the right infrared signal. So on my Harmony remote, I hit the menu button and in a few moments the Kodi screen comes up. You have to mess with it to set it up, especially the remote command profile on the Harmony and Kodi sides, but then it just works.

I've never used Plex so I can't compare the setup experience.