Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

For a while I was happy enough using a single Plex account but lately I've had reason to make a home user for myself. I have some playlists I created on the primary user that I shared with my new user. When I look at the "Shared Media" tab from the Admin account I can see I'm sharing these playlists. When I look at the "Shared Media" tab from the new account I can see they are shared with me. When I go to my pinned menu item for "Playlists" I don't see the playlists. I suspect that the "sharing" just shared the media contained within the playlist but not the playlist itself. Is playlist sharing with Home Users something that can be done?

# ¿ Sep 16, 2020 01:21

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 04:24

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

When you start playing some content, go into the Plex Dashboard from a web browser and you should see any active streams. It will tell you whether the content is being served via Direct Play, Direct Stream or if it's transcoding. Based on your issue and my experience it sounds like your content is being forced into transcoding.

Direct Play is negotiated between client/server based on the clients capabilities so if your content is always transcoding this is likely a problem with the client. I don't know if you're watching from a laptop, ps4, appletv or nvidia shield but one thing I've consistently noticed across platforms: Plex clients default configuration sucks. Go through your clients settings and make sure there is nothing that would downgrade your content, triggering encoding, ex: having 1080p content but your client requesting it in 720p.

This can also happen if content is served via the internet. Plex tries to be helpful and slim down your videos to save you bandwidth at the expense of taxing your CPU to hell. Solvable again by going into the client settings.

Edit: Just realized wifi was in the mix here as well. For what it's worth I've used powerline networking successfully with Plex over my LAN.

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Jun 29, 2021

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 01:12

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I'm using mkvtoolnix to add custom commentary tracks to some movies. My commentaries come with the movies backing audio included so it saves me a step in Audacity but I'm noticing that the sync doesn't seem right when played in Plex.

When played directly on my PC using VLC (either over the network or with the movie on a local drive) it looks perfect or at least close enough. It's just a matter of syncing dialogue to the actors mouths, so not critical, but I was curious if anyone else had done this and had any experience or encountered similar stuff?

I'm adding a secondary audio track, not replacing the primary track. I select the commentary audio track in Plex/VLC and then let the movie play. Looks fine in VLC, a bit off in Plex.

Edit: Just needed to add some more time to the Delay value on the new audio track in mkvtoolnix. Still looks fine in VLC and much better in Plex.

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 23:11 on May 15, 2022

# ¿ May 15, 2022 22:52

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Got a cheap Optiplex 7040 off eBay. Its got an i7-6700. Swapped Windows for Linux and the plan is to migrate some containers running on my NAS. Is it going to be more of a hassle than it's worth for Plex to run in a container? I'd also like to run Jellyfish side by side for evaluation.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2022 15:50

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Enos Cabell posted:

I've had nothing but trouble with DV stuff, I get a green tint using Plex on my Shield Pro direct playing local files. No problem streaming DV from D+ or other services on the same device.

The Plex client doesn't support recent color profiles used in DV or something like that, at least the support on AppleTV isn't current. I don't know the specifics. I spent a frustrating hour chasing error messages about HEVC and Color Profiles before realizing it was purely an issue with the client. As soon as I went to playback in Infuse, as always, it went without a hitch.

Warbird posted:

Containers take little bit to get your head wrapped around but they�re pretty hands off once you get a grip on them. The only reason I�d say not to do it would be stuff like hardware acceleration can sometimes be finicky with Docker Plex instances.

Fake edit: The Linuxserver folks have documentation about that now that seems to address that. Good for them.

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-plex

I'm fine with containers conceptually and in practice, I'm mostly just being cautious about the unknown/pitfalls of jumping from running a "real" install vs transitioning to a container. Example: Plex has an official Docker image but I would guess most people use the linuxservers one you reference.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2022 15:44

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

When Plex is installed in Windows, it persists some config values in the registry. When migrating to Linux you need to set that poo poo manually I assume?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2022 00:11

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I need to recheck my understanding of what I'm trying to do because I'm running into a wall. I'm moving Plex from Windows to Docker on Linux. For reference I've been following the instructions here. For preface, I'm aware of the difference between paths on Windows and Linux and am competent enough to have setup all the other *arr apps in docker already.

I want to shut down the existing Plex instance, copy my data to the destination folder, start the Plex docker container as the old instance including name.

This would be in contrast from the contained Plex being a new server that I migrate meta-data into, later unclaiming the old windows instance and renaming the new one.

Is this possible? I get as far as starting up the Plex container but it's never able to locate the server, presumably because it's looking for the currently shutdown Windows instance.

If I stage my data and claim the local server it has all the right settings (baring media paths needing to be fixed), but it's also clearly a new instance: Both appear in my server list with identical names and my pinned sources are broke because they point to the old one.

Edit: It's the Additional Settings. I got lazy and thought I'd just set them manually but it contains identifying information for the Plex instance. Copying all relevant registry key/value pairs into attributes of Preferences.xml got me there.

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Aug 29, 2022

# ¿ Aug 28, 2022 00:48

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

The trick in my case was because of the platform switch. Windows stores the MachineIdentifier (a GUID representing the unique server instance) in the registry along with other "Additional Settings" whereas on Linux they are stored in the Preferences.xml in your Plex data. The guide just says to back them up but gives no mention of a migration path though. I was lazy and thought I'd just set them manually after starting the server but you can't do that with MachineIdentifier which forced me to put in the effort. It only took a minute to copy the registry key/value pairs into attributes of Preferences.xml which allowed the container to stand up as the existing instance, preserving users pins, etc along with watch history.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2022 03:24

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I don't have a lot of remote users, but there are a couple and I like to avoid pitfalls for them. I have standard cable internet and want to make sure native 720p/1080p is what's being served up to them while also handling 4k locally in home. For those who host 4k content, do you manage it in a separate library? I've resisted doing that so far, colacating HD and 4k, because of uncertainty of how I'd even be able to make radarr work with that without spinning up a 4k-specific instance. Maybe I'm missing something? What do you do, if anything, to handle this?

# ¿ Sep 8, 2022 20:22

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Scruff McGruff posted:

Yeah, I just started serving up 4k stuff and this was the easiest way I found to do it. 4k content lives in its own Plex library, this makes it easier to ensure that people that aren't set up for 4k content aren't forcing my server to transcode it down to 1080p, or that you rely on your users knowing to set their version quality. Similarly, a separate instance of Radarr specifically for 4k content so that I can ensure that movies don't upgrade to 4k, eliminating lower res versions.

Overseerr even expects this to be the setup people feed it, you can give it a second Radarr that's designated for 4k content and it will then give you options of "Request Movie" or "Request in 4k" (again, you can manage what users have permission to request 4k content) so it knows which Radarr to send the request to.

It sounded like a pain in the rear end initially but honestly, it's super simple to set up and I've had no issues with it, especially with Overseerr consolidating the frontend so I don't have to flip between Radarr instances when trying to request stuff.

If you do deploy this way though, if you checked the "all libraries" box in Plex for your users when you initially granted them access, you'll need to go back through and uncheck the 4k library, as they'll get access by default.

Thanks a bunch for this. Overseerr is definitely the missing piece I was looking for.

EL BROMANCE posted:

I love my Apple TV and wouldn't switch it for anything, but the audio codec limitations are definitely a bummer and there's *something* up with 4K stuff that's sourced from Disney+ because it just won't play right anymore (confirmed others have the same issue). Hopefully they get to the bottom of that and it's a simple fix. 4K and remux'd blu-rays have just always been the most problematic things, regardless of platform.

This is pretty much my sentiment, though surprisingly I haven't run into much issue playing Disney+ content that I'm aware of. I have the odd playback issue here and there with some random stuff that the Infuse client handles like a champ though. I've put my remote users on Apple TV's as well and they are who I noticed audio transcoding getting triggered for most whereas I can Direct Play the same file locally. I converted some files with handbrake but don't think anyone's circled back around yet. I've got Tautulli setup to get a better idea of the parameters though.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2022 15:37

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

the milk machine posted:

i don't know if it's the same issue, but recently i've been having an issue where when a show ends and goes to the next episode, there's no sound. it's fixed by backing out and hitting play on the ep again.

Experiencing this as well. AppleTV connected to a receiver, Plex running on Ubuntu via Docker. At first I thought it was specific to some content my kid was watching before catching it happen with stuff that never had issues during repeated watches. Heavily suspect it's the AppleTV client because of that.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2022 21:25

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I have an a age-restricted home user for my kid and it works great. I share my library with a friend who also has a kid and they would like to have the same control. There's no way to provide content from shared libraries to a home user from what I can tell. Am I missing anything?

# ¿ Dec 12, 2022 01:01

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

nexus6 posted:

So my drive containing my media is getting close to full again and I'm getting tired of picking & deleting shows I don't want around anymore just to make space. I've heard about transcoding my files to smaller file sizes - is there a 'set it and forget it' guide to this? Last time I looked you had to install this thing with a bunch of nodes and install plugins etc etc. I'd much rather select my media dir, pick some output formats and just press 'go'.

Motronic posted:

That's what happens once you set up Tdarr (the one where you have to set up a controller and at least one node).

If you don't have a computer with a decent GPU that can transcode (or I guess quicksync?) don't even bother. It will take too long and burn too much power to be worth it all in CPU.

All you need is one machine. The controller and node can both be run on it. That's how mine is set up. I just followed their instructions on setup and config and made everything transcode into h.265. Now it checks every......I dunno, few hours? Grabs anything new and transcodes it. I don't touch it anymore. It just works.

E: it's saved an absurd amount of space:

After this thread reminded me of tdarr I did some googling on setup and someone suggested this guide. Haven't run through it yet myself though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6UMjTlwrxs

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jan 26, 2023

# ¿ Jan 26, 2023 00:19

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Blotto_Otter posted:

yeah, separate libraries is the safest option, but if you want to go the route of a managed account with ratings restrictions, you can filter by tags as well as ratings. There's a handful of PG movies in my library that are too much for kids, so I've got it set up to where I can slap a "not-kids" tag on something and that'll guarantee it gets filtered out of their view.

The reverse is also possible.There are some movies that are PG but I'm fine with my 4 year old watching (ex: Hocus Pocus) and for that stuff I add a "Family" tag and she gets access. I don't maintain separate libraries for movies, but I do for kids shows. Movies are more likely to stick around, but I feel like someday I'll get to reclaim the space Pepa Pig and Paw Patrol take up.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2023 02:57

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I was reading about macvlan's in Docker and if I'm reading this right, you can use it to make your containers appear as devices on the host network? This idea holds a lot of appeal if so. My container setup is pretty simple, just some starrs, Plex etc in a docker-compose file. Anyone done this before? Is it a bigger pain in the rear end than it's worth even in small setups?

# ¿ Feb 25, 2023 16:01

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

toplitzin posted:

I was forcing indirect/off lan for testing with local clients as "external" by hopping on my VPN.

Indirect and WAN are two different things. I have remote users and none of them connect indirectly. An indirect connection means you're getting proxied through official Plex relays.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2023 00:57

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

toplitzin posted:

Only remote users (the parents) are having the issue at the moment.

This sticks out. The Plex client, by default, is configured to stream remote video at 2Mbps. I know you said you set WAN as LAN which should work around this frustrating client default but it's worth testing out.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2023 04:57

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

IOwnCalculus posted:

I can update every other container whenever I feel like with "docker compose pull && docker compose up -d" and it won't interrupt anyone's stream.

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I had searched for an easy way to do this with docker compose and found nothing. I know about watchtower but I prefer to update containers manually. I had given up and just wrote a simple bash script around the standard docker commands so I could give the container_name to but this is much better and will just make the script simpler.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 01:17

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

So my plex has been acting up lately (throwing lots of DB errors, which over tried to fix with sqlite commands but no dice). My appdata is about 7 years old at this point, and multiple different plex containers have been pointed at it. I�m starting to think its time to start fresh.

If I create a new appdata config for it, and name the server the same as my current one, will my users complain or will it be pretty seamless?

I have my watch history synced to Trakt and use plex-trakt-sync to keep it updated so getting my watched status back will be easy (my users will lose theirs but oh well).

Plex Instances are matched by a MachineIdentifer value (stored differently depending on the platform) so just naming them the same will be a little confusing (two instances with the same name but one works and the other doesn't) until you can clean it up. It's possible you can retain the MachineIdentifier while still starting fresh, but you'll wanna experiment by bringing down the old instance and starting up the new one.

Source: I transitioned an instance from Windows to Linux. Wasn't having any db issues at the time though.

Dr. Poz posted:

The trick in my case was because of the platform switch. Windows stores the MachineIdentifier (a GUID representing the unique server instance) in the registry along with other "Additional Settings" whereas on Linux they are stored in the Preferences.xml in your Plex data. The guide just says to back them up but gives no mention of a migration path though. I was lazy and thought I'd just set them manually after starting the server but you can't do that with MachineIdentifier which forced me to put in the effort. It only took a minute to copy the registry key/value pairs into attributes of Preferences.xml which allowed the container to stand up as the existing instance, preserving users pins, etc along with watch history.

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Mar 16, 2023

# ¿ Mar 16, 2023 00:59

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

An internet friend of mind invited me to some plex group on facebook. Sometimes there's some interesting posts but overall the level of discussion is pretty low. Filebot is a very common recommendation there and I have to think it's a "barrier to entry" thing for users who don't have very advanced setups.

At one point most of my stuff wasn't in radarr/sonarr and I just committed a night to each, going through the unmapped folders and setting them up.

To add something that isn't crapping on filebot: I finally setup traefik labels for my internal apps and made a base /etc/hosts that I append to any new machine I setup so now on my local network I can visit https://radarr, https://sonarr, https://bazarr etc. Funny part is I had really just memorized the ports for all the apps but I've wanted this as a setup for so long it doesn't change how nice it feels.

# ¿ May 14, 2023 13:30

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

IShallRiseAgain posted:

It only does that if a drive with the same letter label is detected.

That sounds very Windows-specific. I've seen this happen on a linux hosted server. The NAS wasn't mounted at startup leading to portions of the Library getting wiped. Thankfully this was while standing a new server up from backups, so I didn't lose anything but if it happens at the wrong time it can be annoying.

# ¿ May 24, 2023 00:29

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

deong posted:

What all do i loose when i move a plex library?
I'd like to hit watch history. I can't really think of what else goes away othrewise.

I have recently updated my synology, and it did not go smooth. So since i'm in the middle of the weeds I figure now is a good time to go through and clean out some of my 15 years of organizational fails. So I'm thinking i'll move/rename files to all match one convention.

You can move/rename in place and preserve all that metadata. My original movie folder was a mess a few years ago but using radarr routinely helped me become more disciplined about new stuff, eventually getting to the point of using its built in tools to map and rename everything.

To answer the question, more directly: You specify Library so that means anything Custom. i.e. I add custom Sort Names to some movies like Batman stuff so that they show up in a more preferred way, Posters, Ratings. I can't think of anything else but I'm probably missing something.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 19:33

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I was using Infuse for 4k stuff years back but at this point I think all the issues that kept it around have been resoled. Dolby Vision support wast the last thing that was spotty for me, but I just haven't gone in on it anyway so maybe it doesn't matter.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 19:28

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

Did they fix the audio sync issues on 4k HDR yet?

Not sure. Went and skipped around a 4k HDR movie and had no issue. Been watching a 4k HDR show recently. Googled the problem and saw one that sounds similar caused by having the AppleTV setting Match Content Frame Rate turned on. I also don't experience the "judder" so maybe I have other settings on the TV (LG C2) to prevent, or maybe my content is just in a sweet spot. Frame and audio syncing issues are things that usually stick out to me and I haven't had any issues with it recently.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 22:26

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I've started the process of breaking 4k content out into separate libraries and noticed a weird issue. I have a 4k and HD copy of a movie. I start to play one of them for a few minutes and then stop. The movie then appears twice, once for each library, in my Continue Watching panel. Is there a setting for this?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2023 23:26

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

HKR posted:

If you put both files in the same library Plex will merge them in the same database entry and you can choose which version to play. Sadly their labeling on this sucks and instead of using the Edition feature it just tells you the bitrate of each file (And no idea if this feature is supported in all or any of the TV apps)

Before Merging

After Merge

I'm not sure which file it chooses if you just hit play vs play version, but this might work for your specific use case if the movies are otherwise identical content wise. Sadly for nerds like me who like to keep different versions of the same movie around, it doesn't work.

Thanks for the pointers, but this is precisely what I'm moving away from in order to better support remote users. My mom and my wifes parents can just about handle opening Plex on the AppleTV, finding the movie and hitting play. They wont remember to check versions or pick the right one. I only give them access to the HD library, so they never see the second 4k copy. This is purely an annoyance for my personal accounts since I have all library access.

Edit: Excellent example movie used for the screenshot.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 17:03

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

It's true that Apple slowed old phones with the reason given being aging batteries. The AppleTV doesn't have a battery so that's unlikely to become an issue.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 06:25

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

100TB+ crew, checking in. Synology, single SHR-2 volume, 4x 18TB + 4x 22TB drives, all WD Reds.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Dec 4, 2023

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 02:11

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

EL BROMANCE posted:

Sadly no, it�s always done this. See it as a double reminder to finish your films completely!

Great news! There's a way to fix this using the Editions tags in Plex. I just tested by manually adding a tag, closing/reopening the client on my PC and even checking from an AppleTV. Only one (correct) instance of the movie showing. Just need to update radarrs file naming scheme to match the Plex guidelines to fix the rest. Haven't attempted to use this for the intended use case (differing cuts of movies) but it works to handle this as well.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 16:01

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Manually setting the cover art on content locks it into place. I don't know of a way to lock in the entire library in its current state though and the only other approach I can think would be to save cover art to the content directory per the Plex Local Media Assets naming conventions which seems like an even bigger chore for a substantial library.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 16:52

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

EL BROMANCE posted:

Ha! I use Edition tagging but never thought of doing it for 4K. That�s super smart.

E: Just saw this come up on the Plex Facebook group too, I know your sources now

A few months ago I dipped my toes in some other groups and they were all so much worse across the board. Surprisingly this group has been decent.

Just got radarr automation figured out and working. Create a custom format for 4k, include custom formats in the filename with {edition-{Custom.Formats}}, rename all and done.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 23:00

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

NyetscapeNavigator posted:

I hit the maximum volume limit and had to make a runt ~1TB secondary volume.

Congrats and I'm sorry. Just checked my models limit and I'm not far from hitting it either. I guess that speeds up my time table for a Diskshelf or something.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2023 20:19

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Oysters Autobio posted:

I'm sorry if this is a reoccurring question but OP has no mention of it and I'm not sure of what other megathread is more appropriate.

Any good resources on overseer+plex+radarr+sonarr vs jellyfin+jellyseer+radarr+sonarr?

I know the main ones are the lack of transcoding in the free version of Plex, and I'm guessing jellyfin doesn't connect to your streaming services or anything (though the end goal is to completely cut subs and rely on sharing services).

I'm looking to setup a media server mainly as a way to learn about self hosting tech (docker, NAS etc) while also ending up with something useful at the end (partner and friends prob aren't particularly interested in me spinning up elasticsearch).

Jellyfin, being OSS is appealing but Plex seems more mature, and I have zero clue about how well jellyseer (fork of overseer for jellyfin) works.

If jellyfin vs plex is a dead horse that's well-beaten here let me know but I'd love any links to other megathread or docs that are a good intro to the topic to compare requirements and pros/cons.

I'd be looking to buy either a refurb HTPC or a dedicated NAS to set this up.

Checkout the TRaSH guides for setup. It points out a lot of setup related pitfalls, which seems to get close to answering the primary question. I don't think there's a consolidated feature-tour for the whole stack though, so to figure out full capabilities you'll have to play around.

When I started running Plex it was off my gaming desktop like others. Eventually I needed more disk capacity so I got a NAS and tried hosting Plex off that with my Xbox 360 for playback. I didn't know no better. Eventually I moved Plex over to a spare Windows laptop. I learned all about Transcoding but more importantly I learned about clients differing capabilities and that the best viewing experience was provided by Direct Play. That I should put all my effort into making transcoding as rare as possible by configuring Plex to not downgrade content and making sure my content was in formats easily played by my clients, both remote and local.

Docker is terrible on Windows. It was a resource hog and the arrs would absolutely drag rear end doing anything (and yes, I had my pathing setup properly in the arrs so the import was a file-move not a more expensive file-copy) but the ability to drop a docker-compose.yml on a machine and spin up my whole stack with a "docker compose up -d" is too much of a draw for me to ignore.

I bought a dell optiplex off ebay at the recommendation of this thread, installed Linux, docker copied my data over, spun it up and for the most part everything worked perfectly. The only problems I had that weren't my own setup changes was in transitioning Plex from Windows to Linux there are no clear instructions on how to translate Plex registry settings to Preferences.xml nodes, but a little experimentation will get you there.

I wouldn't go back to Windows on the server at this point because whenever I'm in the server dashboard, the system resource consumption is so much lower. I wouldn't go back to manual installation of this at this point because it's so time consuming in comparison. I had to take my path to get here though with a bunch of different things motivating decisions at each step.

The only thing I would recommend strongly is this: Buy a Dell Optiplex or something equivalent off eBay for your server if you're planning on buying some hardware for this purpose. Inexpensive, Intel QuickSync enabled, small form factor, comes with Windows if you want it. Not a lot of room for drive expansion though, so if you require the server to also be a drive host it's probably not the right fit.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 15:36

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

yeah, I don't host a ton of concurrent remote streams (I think 5 has been my upper limit) so i have a mounted network share for media on my nas which i then path to all my containers. hasn't proven to be a bottleneck. yet.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 15:51

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Sounds like watching in-browser has caused transcoding. First, make sure the video stream quality is set to Original. If that fails try installing the client for whatever OS you're on for a much better experience.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 22:27

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

Did they fix the audio sync issues on 4k HDR yet?

Circling back to this, I've definitely been encountering it with 4k HDR remux content, but not encodes. At this point I just set a +200ms audio offset when watching something. It's really obnoxious, especially as I've been leaning more towards remux lately.

derk posted:

I have yet to get the draw TO docker. maybe I just don't understand how to properly setup a docker container, seems easier to me to set up each service I use manually. Set up plex and all the *arrs years ago and they update and work flawlessly, albeit manually but still. I never seem to get containers to work properly, I don't know.

I run everything on a Ubuntu server with an Xeon and 16gb ECC Ram, older machine, but man just keeps chugging along fine. SSD for ubuntu and the services, 16TB currently of RAID 0 storage, 4x4TB

I feel like my original post explained my personal draw to it and value it gave, and others have already pointed out other advantages so I'll just underline how docker compose is really what attracted me. It's nice having a plain text file that defines all my home services. I can version it and refer back to it easily. Example of radarr/sonarr configs:

code:

  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - my_network
    environment:
      - PGID=${PGID}
      - PUID=${PUID}
      - TZ=${TZ}
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ${CONFIG}/radarr:/config
      - ${DATA}:/data
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - my_network
    environment:
      - PGID=${PGID}
      - PUID=${PUID}
      - TZ=${TZ}
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ${CONFIG}/sonarr:/config
      - ${DATA}:/data
    ports:
      - 8989:8989

If I had to manually setup containers via docker cli I might still do it but I'd hate it a lot more.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 22:01

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

EVIL Gibson posted:

Is it instant desync or over time desync?

I'm pretty sure it's the entire time since I'm able to fix it with an audio offset and if it were something that got worse over time I'd think that would only be a temporary fix.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2024 06:19

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

My workflow for getting Plex to actually use id3 tags is to either have lidarr handle updating them or do it manually in mp3tag to make sure it's all good and consistent. If Plex still doesn't pick it up the changes after "Refresh Metadata" I have to move the music out, refresh the library, and then move it back. Don't even bother with lidarr at this stage, just move the folder, scan the library, move the folder back, scan again. It's incredibly fiddly so I have a backlog of oldies/singles I haven't bothered with for this reason.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2024 15:58

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Just checked the release notes of the latest upgrade and it's a lot. First off:

Plex posted:

(PLEASE NOTE) This version makes changes to the database which will make it compatible only with server versions 1.31.2 or higher (released March 14). You will not be able to use your database on Plex Media Server versions lower than this after this update. Please also be patient when updating to this version if you have a very large database and allow the upgrade process to finish.

Worthwhile to make a quick database backup prior to doing the upgrade just in case. Other notable things, for me at least:

"Plex posted:

(Music) Support ID3v2.4 null-separated tags for genres and release type (#14653)
(View History) No longer create a view history entry for items marked as played (#10888)

Hoping the improved ID3 support helps with the issues Plex has identifying music, especially after tags get updated. Also, now Tautulli wont lie to me when I mark something as watched!

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 18:09

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 04:24

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

I've been slowly downloading music videos off youtube to do something like this and was wondering about integrating Ersatz or something like that to get it done. Thanks El Bromance!

Episode ordering question: I have the complete Batman: The Animated Series managed in Sonarr where it uses TVDB episode ordering. This is not my preferred order of episodes. I know you can change episode ordering in Plex by going to the show, Edit > Advanced > Episode Ordering but this just seems to update the order Plex displays the episode metadata and the file name with S01E01 is STILL the first episode. So for example, in the TVDB order the first episode of BTAS is The Cat and Claw (1). When I changed the episode order to Absolute, On Leather Wings shows up in the list as the first episode, but getting info on the episode shows the file name is still the original Cat and Claw episode.

Apparently switching episode orders in Sonarr is a requested feature since 2015 but there's a game of hot potato as to who's the hold up, the Sonarr team for not prioritizing a rework of show settings/import/rename to include this as an option and then some fingers pointed at the TVDB API for only supporting non-default ordering by exposing two fields related to dvd ordering.

As I can see it my options are bad and worse. Bad: Just not track BTAS in Sonar and manually rename/reorder based on my preference. Worse: Incorrectly re-import them into Sonarr so that the episodes match with my preferred episode ordering in Plex.

Please tell me there's a better way?

Dr. Poz fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 28, 2024

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

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