Plex doesn't seem right

[kingfiggle]

I have been broken. I really enjoy trying to figure stuff out on my own but, after a few hours of bouncing between the PLEX forums and here, I give up. I am brand spanking new to NAS and it is showing.

I have FreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE-x64 running on an AMD Phenom II X4 940 Processor (quad-core) with 8GB of RAM. It is connected to my network through rj-45 cable into a switch that only has this machine and my LG smart tv on it and then into a router. I followed the instructions for installing Plex in a jail. Upon looking in the jail, I can see the Plexmediaserver and it has an IP addy and says it is running. When I turn on my television, I can see the Plex media server and can select it and browse my movies and play them.

One of the two problems I am having is that any movie (ranging in size from 600MB to 6.5GB) will start freezing every 40 seconds or so. It only happens about 60% of the time; not 100%. I am not aware of any differences between when it works and when it doesn't. The other issue is that I am unsure of what I am actually looking at with the Plex server. I tried it out months ago just installed on my laptop and it looked completely different than this. This one just shows a bunch of thumbnails across my tv screen with no information associated with it. I remember the straight install on my laptop had a splash screen with IMDB-like info (actors, synopsis, ratings...). I tried to change the Plex configuration but it doesn't have a save button on the Agents tab, and that's what seems to be changing back to the default every time I click off that tab.

Thanks in advance for any help. I truly do appreciate it.

 

[cyberjock]

This isn't the Plex forums. As such, don't expect much support here. We troubleshoot and solve problems with the PBI such as it not installing right, not working right(only if its the PBIs fault), etc.. As for the Plex software itself, we don't support it here. You'll have to go to the Plex forums.

But, normally if a movie or something is freezing, then either the movie file has corruption or the hardware isn't up to the task of transcoding. I will say that 8GB of RAM is the minimum for FreeNAS with ZFS. If you want to use Plex you should be using more. Plex will need more, and everything that Plex uses will be taken from the ZFS ARC, hurting performance overall. You also need a rather powerful processor for transcoding, and you definitely don't have that. I'm not an AMD fan, so I can't vouch for if that CPU in a FreeNAS machine should be able to transcode a movie or not. But, when I look up your CPU, it's less powerful than my 4 year old laptop's CPU! And I'd never try to run Plex from my laptop for transcoding because I know how slow my laptop is. It can play a movie okay. But transcoding.. probably not. And transcoding from ZFS, even less likely.

I am a Plex user myself, and they redid the GUI in the last couple of months. So things do look very different. You can change the GUI to something resembling the old format. But you'll have to go to the Plex forums for that because I don't want to get in the habit of supporting stuff that is outside of FreeNAS.

 

[kingfiggle]

Thank you for your thoughts. Sorry about posting in the wrong forum. I saw other mentions of Plex and didn't see the differentiation.

 

[cyberjock]

Thank you for your thoughts. Sorry about posting in the wrong forum. I saw other mentions of Plex and didn't see the differentiation.

Yeah, I've tried to "cracked the whip". I don't delete questions not related to FreeNAS directly, I just move them to offtopic(which I'll do in a second). Often people do have the answer here and I hate being the person to silence other people. Often someone here has the answer, but this place isn't the *best* place to get the answer.