Plex

Since this post was made last week, we've gotten a lot of feedback regarding the new policy, and it's understandable that many of you are unhappy with the restriction. It makes it difficult to discuss how to effectively set up a full Plex server stack which includes a VPN and torrent solution which feed into Sonarr / Radarr / etc. So, after some discussion and thought, we've decided to loosen the rule a litte bit in order to better facilitate such discussions.

Moving forward, discussions regarding how to acquire media will be permitted. Users here who need help setting up and troubleshooting the means and methods of acquiring media - such as installing VPN and torrent client docker containers - may come here for help and users here may feel free to answer openly. Soon, we may feature guides in the sidebar to help facilitate these processes, as the goal here is to help Plex users set up and operate Plex Media Servers.

The line where it becomes unacceptable is where discussion veer into the acquisition of any specific media. Posts or comments asking how to find/acquire specific shows / films / albums and on are not permitted. As stated previously, there are other communities for that. Frankly, they’re better resources for that kind of help anyway.

We hope these loosened restrictions make it easier for users here to have open discussions and make it more clear that we're trying to focus on the purpose of helping Plex users set up, troubleshoot, and maintain their servers.

Rule 4 in the sidebar has been updated to reflect this shift in policy.

We welcome feedback and discussion in the comments below!

Cheers!

-- c/Plex Mod Team

• Plex FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about using Plex Media Server and client apps with many useful links
• Useful Plex Add-ons - Detailed info on many Plex add-ons with setup guides and other useful links
• Join the c/Plex community on Matrix!

Weekly Advice / No Stupid Questions Post

This is part of a weekly series of Plex Advice threads for novices and pros alike to ask questions, give advice, troubleshoot, and share knowledge and resources! Please be polite and helpful to beginners just getting started out, and we want to be as welcoming as we can to newcomers to this community.

Common subjects can include:

• Plex Media Server setup
• System requirements and advice buying components
• Advice choosing the operating system that's right for you
  • Getting started with a new operating system (eg. Linux, macOS, etc.)
• Advanced setup and configuration
• Help with PMS add-ons:
  • Docker
  • VPN advice
  • Setup / configuration of the \*arr family of apps (Sonarr, Radarr, etc.)

Anyone who posts good starter guides, FAQs, and/or wikis may get their links added to the sidebar so the rest of the community can benefit!

Cheers!

---

Useful Resources

• Plex FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about using Plex Media Server and client apps with many useful links
• Useful Plex Add-ons - Detailed info on many Plex add-ons with setup guides and other useful links
• Organizing and Naming Your Media Files
• Troubleshooting Server Connections
• Plex User Forums

Taken from the discord

> We have an important update to share - we're going to be rebranding!

> That's right, the time has come for us to say goodbye to the Plex Meta Manager name and introduce a new brand identity.

> Whilst this may seem out of the blue, it is something we have been considering for nearly a year - in order to future-proof, it is important that we disassociate ourselves from the "Plex" trademark.

> Rest assured, the functionality of the tool remains unchanged; only the name will be different.

> We value the input of our users and invite you to help us decide our new name. We've included a Google Form link for your submissions. Feel free to think outside the box, but please ensure your suggestions respect existing trademarks, are practical and make sense for the product. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday April 9th at 12:00 pm EDT

> https://forms.gle/VYf7KykxbVGGi4oF8

> Additionally, be prepared for future updates, such as the retirement of the current docker image and the introduction of a new one, or any necessary configuration changes to reflect the new branding - we will send out further updates when we have more to share on this.

> Thank you for your understanding and participation in this exciting phase of our journey!

This is something I've been trying to do reliably for years. I can stream anything I want easily with VLC or even just Chrome itself but I can't get subs to work. I was able to make it work for a long time using a Chrome app called "videostream" but it now no longer works correctly on my system. It's a bit confusing to me but it kind of looks from what I have read that Plex can apparently handle this? Most references to the idea seem to be for later chromecast versions but mine's a 1st gen I bought in 2014. Could I use Plex to stream local media with separate or embedded srt files to my chromecast ?

Over night, Plex has decided that it can't see any of my library files for movies and TV shows. They were fine before, they have been for years. Only music is unaffected.

I get a message saying "movies is empty. Expecting more? Visit the manage libraries page"

I've tried creating a new library pointing to the same directory, but that one shows the same error in the end.

Had a look on the forums, but not found anything relevant

In January and February I had curated some playlists and shared them with friends and we watched them together via Watch Together. There was previously an option to Grant Access to the playlist, and after granting access, you could click Watch Together and start a watch party.

However, sometime in the last few weeks this option has disappeared in playlists, and now I am restricted to granting access, but not being able to watch together.

Really the only people who have access to my server is my partner and three friends. This has been a huge bummer, because I was curating old shows complete with old commercials in between.

If anyone has info on why this changed, I'd love to have an understanding, because the change kind of blows...

Hello!

Here is my current setup and what I am looking for from my next one:

Currently have a Nvdia Shield with a 4 and 8 TB HDDs attached to it directly. So far this has worked well for 2-3 remote streams of 1080p content.

I’m looking to upgrade to a Beelink off Amazon which would allow 3-4 4K streams and a HD enclosure that would allow me to attach my external HDDs and start a NAS. Please advise on how to proceed from here.

I have a few shows like the Daily Show I'll sometimes watch the monologue but not the full episode.

!

Plex has a setting to "Keep unwatched episodes" which will delete never-watched episodes, and another to "delete X days after viewing" for fully-watched episodes. But if an episode is partially watched, neither applies and it just sits there.

This seems like a weird oversight and I am wondering if there's a setting I'm missing. I can't be the first person who wants "delete 7 days after adding regardless of anything else"

I hope this doesn't mean they are on the slippery slope of selling user data, thoughts?

I have a user who has watched Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler 13 times in a month and I am starting to get concerned. I try to mind my own business with what people watch but when the stats say that it is the most watched movie and there is only one user that watched it, you start to get curious.

Hey all, just wondering what others are using for a rack mount server option. I don't want to break the bank, and I have a P2000 I plan to use for transcoding. I had picked up a Hyze Zeus server, but unfortunately, the GPU won't fit in that box. I plan to have this machine dedicated to Plex. All of my data will be stored on my trunas server and server up to plex via NFS shares, so the server doesn't need much storage capacity. I would prefer the server to be a 1u rack mount... but if 2u is going to offer the best option, I will settle for 2u.

Looking for recommendations on a streaming box to connect my TV to plex. I have a lot of 4k blu ray rips averaging 80-100mbps and I'm struggling to find a client that can handle it. First I had a Roku, which had network bandwidth issues. So I moved to the new fire stick 4k max, which still buffers like crazy. I don't think its network related because its pulling 500mbps down, and my laptop (which pulls 300 down) can stream it just fine. So any recommendations on a tv streaming box? I've seen the Nvidia shield, and the Mecool KM2 plus deluxe but want to get some opinions before buying anything. Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/6329982

"I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff," a user said of Plex's Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.

Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a “week in review” email last week that showed them what they and their friends had watched on the popular media server software. Some users are saying that their friends’ softcore porn habits are being revealed to them with the feature, while others are horrified by the potentially invasive nature feature more broadly.

Plex is a hybrid streaming service/self-hosted media server. In addition to offering content that Plex itself has licensed, the service allows users to essentially roll their own streaming service by making locally downloaded files available to stream over the internet to devices the server admin owns. You can also “friend” people on Plex and give them access to your own server.

A new feature, called “Discover Together,” expands social aspects of Plex and introduces an “Activity” tab: “See what your friends have watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you,” Plex notes. It also shares this activity in a “week in review” email that it sent to Plex users and people who have access to their servers.

This has greatly alarmed a wide swatch of Plex’s user base, who have blown up the Plex forums, the Discover Together blog post comment section, and Reddit with posts about disastrous overshares created by the feature. A sampling of posts: “Discover Together and Week in Review emails are a MASSIVE breach of privacy and trust!,” “Security breach: Why is my friend receiving notifications to rate movies I’ve watched?,” “Weekly review emails data leak,” “Plex crossed a line with ‘Your week in review’ emails today.’”

The feature is opt-out, meaning that many people were very surprised to get these emails and see this feature, as it’s up to users to proactively turn it off (instructions here and here).

“I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff (think classic ‘skinemax’ fare) from some server (it’s not mine) or Plex channel, and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this,” one user wrote on the Plex Forums. “Now replace this friend, who’s just enjoying their downtime with some cheeky T&A, with a teenager who may be having difficulty figuring out feelings about their sexuality and are just trying to explore by watching LBGT dramas to see if anything there resonates or can help them figure things out. Suddenly, one of their intolerant friends or parents gets a detailed email report with a cheery title listing every little thing they’re watching…This is a dystopian nightmare of a feature and I honestly can’t believe it’s been rolled out as opt-out like this. SHAME ON YOU, PLEX!”

“I wonder how many people just had their week’s porn selections emailed to their Plex friends,” another user posted. “I just got an email about a friend’s watching habits which he definitely didn’t want to share. He insists he’s never opted into any data sharing, but…it went out anyway.”

“I’m sure there’s a certain percentage of people who want to know what kind of porn their grandma likes, but I’m hoping it’s not the majority,” another posted.

Otto Kerner, who is a moderator of the official Plex forums, said that porn viewing habits would only be shared if Plex can make a “match” of the media with online databases like IMDb. “Many pr0n titles are either not listed there at all [sic],” Kerner wrote. It’s worth noting, however, that there are many adult titles on IMDb.

There are hundreds of posts about the issue on the official Plex forums, many of which point out that many Plex users chose to use the service in the first place because it is a “self-hosted” alternative to streaming that many people go into believing they will have more control and privacy than is offered by Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services. Plex is also used by many users to play and stream files that they have illegally pirated (the ability to do this is largely behind the initial popularity of Plex), though the company has been trying to move away from the perception that most people are using it to play pirated content. “The fact that this data is available to you AT ALL … That is just … Mind boggling, and completely against the very notion of self hosting,” one user wrote. “I feel betrayed that was done without telling me that this data was going to be collected. Let alone acted upon. It’s dangerous. Certain entities would LOVE to have that data…which could mean jail time for some.”

“The ‘See what your friends are watching’ will be great for all the people with secret porn libraries. Or when you start watching a Jan 6th documentary, and you see Aunt Becky start commenting about it being part of a satanic conspiracy,” a commenter on Plex’s blog post announcing the feature wrote. “I can also say that not one person I have talked to has ever liked the idea that I can see what they're watching from my server.”

Plex did not respond to requests for comment sent from 404 Media. Plex employees have been posting regularly in the forums explaining that people can opt out of the data sharing, and have also said media watch “sync events,” which it uses to track viewing history, do not tell the company the nature of the file played: “There is no way to know whether something being ‘watched’ occurred because you went and saw it at the theater and then marked it on the Discover page when you got home, you watched through a personal Plex Media Server Library, or anything else.”

I just saw they have a deal running again in case anyone was looking to upgrade. Code: FUZZYFRIDAY

!

From a given show Plex allows you to search for a subtitles off of OpenSubtitles (the .org I guess?), but many (all?) contain spam messages within the texts.

Does anyone else experience this?

OK I found a subtitle spam cleaner - now how can this integrate with Plex or do I have to setup Bazarr...

For some songs and artists plex doubles the title or name and puts a semi-colon with it. I can not figure out why from the file or naming it is doing this. Does this happen to anyone else?

Thanks

Bonus points for FOSS

My brother who is using my plex account at his home and not on my network and he received this error. Has anyone seen this before? Should I be concerned?

Hey guys, I’ve never used Plex before but am looking to set up a server this week for me and my family as streaming bills are getting out of control. I have a small library of legally acquired media that will work as a good test before I go sailing for the rest.

I have a Thinkserver TD340 desktop with dual xeons and space for many hard drives that I was going to use simply due to its HDD capacity

(12c24t combined and 64gb RAM)

However they’re sandy bridge Xeon’s and not very power efficient. However I can put a Quadro P2000 GPU in it for hardware accelerated transcoding

The other idea I have is I have access to an HP SFF PC with an i5 8400T and a few external hard drive mounts I could plug into power in the wall and USB to the PC

This is smaller and saves power but forgoes GPU acceleration leaving me with only Intel UHD 630 graphics. It’s also only 6 cores/threads but they are much faster.

I also want whichever system I use to run pi-hole for DNS level ad blocking. But that’s very light and shouldn’t be an issue to run at the same time.

Am I overthinking this? I have access to both systems. Which would be best. At most maybe 3 people would be accessing it at once. Across iPhones, smart TVs etc

Lately my episode guide is showing episode titles, but not the show name. This isn't all that useful and I'd prefer the old behavior.

Is this happening to anybody else? Is there a setting to fix it?

It’s frustrating that the artist list doesn’t have all of the alphabet. Mine only goes A-L for example. This might be a CarPlay side limitation but either way it’s not great.

If I wanted to play Warren Zevon I can only do it from my phone.

Hello,

For context I have ran 2 Plex servers off of one network for 6+ years with no issues but as of a couple days ago I have had this issue with no change from my end. Does anyone have a work around for this other than contacting my ISP witch Plex talks about when I hit learn more. Has anyone seen this issue before. Thanks

Sorry, don't mean to beat a dead horse but what's the best currently available Plex client all things considered?

I think I have quite a few items in my library with both a 720p and 1080p version stored on disk. I'd like to find them but can't figure out how to do that through the interface. Is there a way? The closest I found was creating a collection where "Episode Duplicate" is true - but that is still like finding a needle in a haystack. I have to click through seasons, look at each episode's info and see if theres' two files.

I know there's a sqlite database com.plexapp.plugins.library.db but I can't figure out where in there I'd find that info.

I love clicking through the cast of movies but I wish I could do the same the creators of movies/shows.

I run a Plex server on in a Docker container on a Linux machine in my house on a Verizon FiOS internet connection. I've shared my library with many people and no one has a problem. Except one person who uses optimum.net as their service provider. When in their house I can't direct connect to my Plex server, and everything gets sent through at 1mbps, I assume relayed through Plex.

I have a Tailscale mesh VPN setup for myself. I installed Tailscale on the "Chromecast with Google TV" Android app and connected it to my VPN. I set it up to route all traffic through the VPN using the same physical server that runs Plex as it's Exit Node. When this is enabled, everything works fine.

What could be causing this. Another odd artifact of this set up - while connected to the optimum.net network I can't even make simple HTTPS requests to a web server running in another Docker container on the same Linux machine as Plex. The request appears to never even make it to the server.

I’ve swipped left/right, I’ve long clicked, and I’ve check menus and I don’t see how to delete.

We both setup servers at about the same time a few years ago and shared with each other. I’m sure once the dust settles someone will pull the he plug on his server and it’ll be offline for good.

Watching School Of Rock on his server one more time while I can.

Edit: his server is officially offline now. Rest in peace.

About a year and a half ago I posted a script I made for deleting movie content in your library not being watched. Folks really seemed to like it, and I still get comments on that thread every so often. So I've updated it!

Far and away, the two biggest requests I got were:

• Make it do TV, too
• Make a dry-run mode
• Edit: Added just now: a protected mode when you volume mount a protected file!

The code is now available on github here:

https://github.com/ASK-ME-ABOUT-LOOM/purgeomatic

Even better, no installation is required. You can run it as a docker container like so:

docker run --rm -it --env-file .env --network=host ghcr.io/ask-me-about-loom/purgeomatic:latest python delete.movies.unwatched.py

 

It now supports TV series as well. Thanks to a suggestion from /u/JimLahey-, I was able to get my head around the idea - I had always thought of managing TV shows as "collections of seasons" of media, but the reality is, if nobody has watched anything related to a TV show in a while, the whole thing can go! And that's what this does:

docker run --rm -it --env-file .env --network=host ghcr.io/ask-me-about-loom/purgeomatic:latest python delete.tv.unwatched.py

 

No more editing python, either. Create yourself a .env file, set up all of your config, and even enable dry run mode, so you can test to your heart's content:

$ docker run --rm -it --env-file .env --network=host ghcr.io/ask-me-about-loom/purgeomatic:latest python delete.movies.unwatched.py DRY_RUN enabled! -------------------------------------- 2023-08-25T12:40:57.288608 DRY RUN: Chaos Walking | Radarr ID: 1445 | TMDB ID: 412656 DRY RUN: Captain Marvel | Radarr ID: 885 | TMDB ID: 299537 DRY RUN: Captain America: Civil War | Radarr ID: 1768 | TMDB ID: 271110 DRY RUN: Black Widow | Radarr ID: 1517 | TMDB ID: 497698 DRY RUN: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) | Radarr ID: 1092 | TMDB ID: 495764 DRY RUN: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure | Radarr ID: 1777 | TMDB ID: 1648 DRY RUN: Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey | Radarr ID: 1778 | TMDB ID: 1649 DRY RUN: Big Hero 6 | Radarr ID: 71 | TMDB ID: 177572 DRY RUN: Big | Radarr ID: 71 | TMDB ID: 177572 DRY RUN: Batman Begins | Radarr ID: 1745 | TMDB ID: 272 DRY RUN: Assault on Precinct 13 | Radarr ID: 1212 | TMDB ID: 17814 DRY RUN: 21 Jump Street | Radarr ID: 1096 | TMDB ID: 64688 Total space reclaimed: 164.88GB

 

To use protected mode, just create a text file with one TMDB/TVDB ID per line and volume mount it as /app/protected like so:

docker run --rm -it --env-file .env --network=host -v /home/user/protected:/app/protected ghcr.io/ask-me-about-loom/purgeomatic:latest python delete.movies.unwatched.py  

Good luck! Please let me know if you have questions or problems and I'll do my best to help out!

The c/Plex community has moved to lemm.ee at !plex@lemm.ee! Join us there!

Regular posts will no longer be made to this community.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and we hope to see you at our new home!

PUBLIC - Version 1.46.1

Platform: Windows, Mac, and Linux

Fixes

• Corrected playback of some VOD content on Linux
• Fixed loading error when navigating quickly between certain views
• [Discover Together] Onboarding is now non-dismissible
• [Discover Together] Refresh Profile hubs after changing privacy settings or item rating

PUBLIC - Version 5.67.2

Platform: Samsung 2016 to 2022 Televisions (Tizen 2.4, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 6.5)

Fixes

• Fixed loading error when navigating quickly between certain views
• [Discover Together] Onboarding is now non-dismissible
• [Discover Together] Refresh Profile hubs after changing privacy settings or item rating

PUBLIC - Version 5.67.2

Platform: Hisense models (in United States and Europe) running the U4 system software

Fixes

• Fixed loading error when navigating quickly between certain views
• [Discover Together] Onboarding is now non-dismissible
• [Discover Together] Refresh Profile hubs after changing privacy settings or item rating

PUBLIC - Version 5.67.2

Platform: VIZIO SmartCast

Fixes

• Fixed loading error when navigating quickly between certain views
• [Discover Together] Onboarding is now non-dismissible
• [Discover Together] Refresh Profile hubs after changing privacy settings or item rating

PUBLIC - Version 5.67.2

Platform: LG webOS 3.0+

Fixes

• Fixed loading error when navigating quickly between certain views
• [Discover Together] Onboarding is now non-dismissible
• [Discover Together] Refresh Profile hubs after changing privacy settings or item rating