Plex Update Library Plugin

I am always searching for new and exciting software to help manage my growing media library at home. Recently I came across one such platform called Plex. The goal of Plex is to create a complete solution for all your online and local media needs. For the purpose of this guide I will take a look at Plex Media Server, which acts as a central media management database for distributing all your content to your various playback devices. Downloads: All downloads for Plex can be found I will be specifically installing Plex Media Server (PMS) on my Windows Home Server, which can be found (make sure you download Plex Media Server and not Plex Media Center).

I am certainly aware of the PlexUpdate Plugin but find it to be a very inefficient solution for updating my Plex library as it sends URL based command to re-scan the entire library every time you execute a beet import co. Not sure where this would go, but anyone have any suggestions on why it takes so long to update my plex library from ACD? I have all my files in ACD and am slowly deleting. I am using a plugin for my unraid server but the mount portion of the script looks like this: rclone mount --max-read-ahead 1024k.

Requirements: As per the Plex website, here are the requirements (once again, specifically for Windows): Windows minimum requirements • Windows XP SP3, Vista, or Windows 7 • Flash and Silverlight video requires Windows Vista or Windows 7 • Direct X 9.0c compatible graphics card • An Intel Core 2 Duo processor or equivalent • At least 2GB of RAM, 4GB recommended For optimal performance and compatibility with Plex Media Manager, we recommend Google Chrome, Safari, FireFox, or IE9 with N.B. Windows Vista or above is required for Flash and Silverlight video. In order to play Flash and Silverlight video, you will need to install the plug-ins on your computer before running the Plex Media Server. Install the Flash version from and make sure you select the “Other Browser” version. • Plex on your Desktop (i.e. HTPC) • Plex for mobile devices (iOS and Android) • Plex for connected devices (2011 and 2012 LG Smart TVs, Google TV, and Roku) I don’t own any “connected” devices and didn’t get a chance to test out Plex on my HTPC (possibly a future writeup), but I did test out Plex on my mobile devices (i.e.

IPad, Asus Transformer Tablet, and Kindle Fire). Plex mobile app currently costs $4.99 (iOS,, and ). Let’s take a quick look at Plex for Android. With the App installed, the first step will be connecting to your PMS, as well signing in to your myPlex account is applicable. You can also adjust some of the settings such as the video quality PMS should use for both when you are in network and when you are remotely connected.

Once you are connected to your PMS you will now be taken to the Plex homepage where you can access all your media broken into three categories (My Library, Channels, and Recently Added). Playback: I was only able to test out playback on my home network (all my mobile devices are wi fi only and typically the places where I travel with them don’t have free wi fi to test out).

In order to play back content on mobile devices, PMS will transcode the content (typically just videos) into a format that your mobile device will support. Because of this, there are several things that will occur. First, transcoding is a CPU intensive process, how well playback works may depend on the PC being used by PMS as well as if any other CPU intensive processes are running on the PC at the same time. Secondly, since transcoding is occurring there will be varying results in the picture quality (in combination with the video settings chosen, wireless connection, etc). I would typically encounter some pixelation but on a small screen such as a mobile device it is more the acceptable. At times some A/V sync issues would occur but I could usually get cleared up pretty easily.

I would be very interested to see how well video playback looks on a big screen TV where pixelation and degradation would be more pronounced. Music and photo playback had no issues (typical content being 320kbps mp3s and 2-3MB photos). Additional Information: There were a couple of additional items worth mentioning: • When you install PMS, all cached data will be stored on the same drive as where PMS is installed. For most people this hopefully shouldn’t be an issue assuming you have sufficient free space on your install drive.

However, as a Windows Home Server user I am only allocated 20GB worth of free space on my C: drive. After installing PMS and adding media I noticed that my WHS started moving at a snails pace and eventually crashed on me. When I booted back up nearly all of the free space on my C: drive had been eaten up.

After digging around I noticed that the straw that broke the camels back was PMS, where the cached folder was taking up nearly 4GB worth of space. After digging around it appears there is an option to point PMS to a separate drive for caching.

I was able to get it to work but not 100% (I pointed it to one of my shared network folders and could see the cache had moved, but encountered some issues with images showing properly). • I keep running into some stability issues with PMS, so I have had to shut off for the time being. All of a sudden while using one if the media players in my house it would become unresponsive. I would head over to my WHS and would see Plex errors appearing (Transcoding.exe crashing, etc). Don’t know what was causing the errors since at the time Plex wasn’t even being used, but ultimately I need my WHS as close to 100% stable as possible which meant shutting off PMS. At some point I may revisit. Final Thoughts: I must say I am very impressed in what Plex has to offer.

In my head the ultimate home setup revolves around having a central server/database that feeds to various devices, and Plex sure seems to fit the bill. This is where I think home media is heading, where all content is stored in a central location (whether it be cloud, server, etc) and distributed to various devices. For those who are using Plex I would be interested to hear your feedback. In particular for those using Plex on their HTPCs how do you find file support/playback, is PMS required for an HTPC, etc For Connected Devices how well does the Plex App work and especially how is picture quality for video playback?

UPDATE – thanks to GusGus for pointing out, and unRAID plugin for Plex is in the works. Tagged as:,,,,,,,. Article by Hi, my name is Damian, and I'm tech gadget addict!

Although I always had some interest in technology, it wasn't until I got my EX470 and more importantly found Mediasmartserver.net, that my interest became an addiction. My goal, aside from world domination and to see the Mets/Broncos win another championship, is to set up the perfect digital home where all my media is available at the click of a button. When I am not writing for Mediasmartserver.net you can find me over at my blog at or follow me on. Plex has become my choice for Media Center, the main reason being that it there is a plugin for Roku, so I can stream to Roku devices in the house without much hassle. When the Plex player is installed on a Windows HTPC, it asks if you want to add it as a menu item in WMC, and it is pretty seamless. If you have iTunes installed on the Plex server system, it links very nicely to your iTunes catalog, sorted, categorized and with a pretty nice display. As of now, I only use WMC as a PVR, to watch recorded TV shows.

I am looking for a decent PVR software (I miss SageTV!) to replace that piece also. For everything else I use Plex. After several years running Windows Media Centre I got over the maintenance and constant fiddling. I wanted to remove it and replace it with a PVR for FTA recording and a media streamer. I am running WHS 2011 and have several devices (Mobiles, PCs, Streamers, Game Consoles, PVRs and SmartTVs) that need to access the data. After trying several different Media Server software solutions (Mezzmo, Twonky, Serviio, Tversity and PS3 Media Server) I stumbled onto Plex. The main TV is a Samsung so I installed the app and gave it ago.

Even though the Samsung app does not yet support Music, MyPlex, customer skins or Photos it is still by far the best HTPC replacement for content management I have found. Metadata is presented beautifully. The quality of the picture is perfect. I am running it over a wired connection but still very impressive.

The iPad app is also very good. Better than any other solution I could find to stream HD content constantly. I still kept Serviio to stream Home Videos and other connect until the app gets updated. One minor annoyance is the poor backlight levels which is believed to be a Samsung issue.

I would recommend Plex to anyone. I know this guide is a bit old, but I was reading in hopes that Damian had found some secret sauce that would let me use Plex again. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I agree with Damian, that a centralized server and a client architecture is the ultimate setup. If only we could get such a server for XBMC, we’d be set!

However, I have a tried Plex and PMS a number of times, but have never been able to stick with it. The main reason is that which Jaremy points out. It absolutely sucks if your whole collection is Blu-Ray ISO rips and you want to bitstream the HD audio on those. As of today, Plex still has absolutely no support for either of those options. Hell, it’s not even in a beta build for those of us that like to play with unstable code.

Once Plex figures out how to get those two items worked in, I think it will be one of the top contenders for the HTPC setup. Everything they need to do it is in the pre-Frodo code for XBMC already.

Just needs to be merged and cleaned up. And Jaremy, I’m running a nightly build of XBMC Frodo and it is handling both BD ISOs and HD audio like a champ. I suggest checking it out. And if you use a MySQL setup to share libraries between multiple clients, it’s almost the right fit.

I’ve been running PLEX on my WHS2011 for a while now. No transcoding.exe errors or anything for me! Some minor instabilities with transcoding once in a while though (streams not starting, having to restart the plex media server), but other than that I really love it! This is just a little example why: I was out snowboarding for a week in france and had internet there. So i grabbed my transformer, hooked it up to the tv there over hdmi, and started the plex app. I was streaming my movies/series there in no time!

Here’s just hoping they can make a dedicated whs2011 plugin, current installation/setup is not ideal. Plex on WHS 1 on MSS. Great review. I didn’t know about this product and am checking it out. Because of the warning about the C drive, I installed on D: program files The problem I’m having is typical of non-server products even though I installed the server version of the product. When I log out of the MSS, the service stops. When I login, the service starts.

When I right click on the icon, my only choice is to start the media server when I login. There’s nothing about running the program as a service without login. Running the program and disconnecting the RDP session is uncool. How did you get around this, or was it even an issue?

Not so sure about the lack of iso support that everyone is discussing. I just ran a DVD iso via my android app, and I know the files are supported on the windows desktop app as well. I have been using Plex ever since they rolled out with the desktop media center, and will never go back. I have a central server with my media, then I have 2 android phones, apple tv, iPad, and a living room HTPC setup with Plex. I love how user friendly the software is, and my wife (who hated the old setup) loves Plex. My only complaint regarding Plex is that it can’t run as a service, YET. Once this happens, I will love the total hands off approach to my server.

“Streaming” works funny on Plex. Basically what happens is that it greatly depends on your client system if you can stream Plex items or not.

I use VIDEO_TS as my primary storage method, and they are stored on a WHS v1 server. The Plex server runs on my primary desktop. The VIDEO_TS play fine on my Win7 HTPC, but they will not play on my Roku system. Basically the Plex server acts as an indexer, and then gets out of the way, if the player can play the file natively without transcoding. Once the movie is playing on the HTPC, Plex gets out of the way, and the HTPC talks directly to the WHS where I have the movie stored.

I can turn off the Plex server, and the movie will continue to play undisturbed, but naturally I can’t get back to the main movies index if the PLEX is turned off. The same movie that plays on my HTPC will not play on the Roku. Plex does not know how to transcode VIDEO_TS, and the Roku doesn’t either. But movies that have been converted by another way to M4V play fine on both. So if your computer can play a file from a local drive, it should work from a Plex server.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Download Iso Image on this page. Philip McDunnough. Having just gone through the install, created my media libraries and logged out of the WHS I sat wondering when the indexing would finish. Wish I’d read all the comments now and done some more research. How on earth can this be called “Plex media server” when a local user has to be logged on the whole time or else it stops working. That’s an application not a server. I’m somewhat disappointed.

When I searched their forums and site I found that their stated intention is to not have a proper server/service/daemon and they’ve no intention of developing one. Ok as an addendum, I should add that we are getting a lot of videos to queue up now. Almost all Dailymotion vids are accessible we didn’t realize the preferences are best left on automatic instead of Direct Play/Direct Stream/Transcode. Dailymotion, Youtube, and most video sources can be queued up, and then later played by streaming on the Roku player. But NOT Blinkx. We cannot queue them up, and we cannot play them back no matter what.

Don’t see why because there is no copyright infringement if we can watch them on the computer monitor, why can’t we watch them on the roku streaming device? The Blinkx app on the Roku player sucks and we never use it. We only use Dailymotion and Youtube etc.

Sony has Youtube, as do most other streaming devices, and Netgear I think has Dailymotion as an app. I don’t want to buy another frickin streaming device just for the video search app If anybody has any idea how to queue up Blinkx and play it on a Roku with the Plex software, let us know or, does anybody want to buy a couple of Roku players? Well, now the DailyMotion videos queue up ok, but they no longer play on the Plex app of the Roku. Just one day, they quit playing, and we are getting the error message that the video may have “changed formats”. I am guessing DailyMotion doesn’t want people adding their videos to a queue and then watching them later on a Roku streaming device. I have even bought a Sony streaming device, which actually has Dailymotion as an app, but it doesn’t work either.

It only streams Youtube videos. Everybody is so frickin worried about their copyrights that they won’t let you watch the videos that are in their frickin search engines. Krazyone, MakeMKV is an awesome ripping tool, and it is easy to use. However, I’ve had a few issues with BD rips.

I ripped the new Mission Impossible movie and John Carter, and at certain scenes it would stutter / lag for a few seconds and then it would play fine again. I re-ripped the movies with ClownBD + AnyDVD HD, and I didn’t have any issues. I only use MakeMKV for DVD movies since I don’t have any issues with them, but after testing and unsuccessfully being able to play BD movies ripped by MKV, I’m continuing to use ClownBD. I am sure that others do not have issues with it. It could also be my set up, but who knows.

Might be of interest to others: Plex consumes a lot of disk and it is using the profile folder for its cache. To change this you need to add a key in the registry. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software Plex, Inc. Plex Media Server] “LocalAppDataPath”=”D: Program Files Plex Plex Data” I’m running an EX470 and sys drive has only 20 GB allocated and Plex did eat it up.

I’ve also written a BAT-script to check the status on Plex (memory usage and if it is responding) and will restart it if appropriate. You can get a copy of it here: (update it with your path to Plex/download pslist and pskill as described in the BAT-script) pmcdunnough. I installed Plex in D: and it worked fine. It didn’t install anything in C: which meant the space wasn’t used up.

Now I don’t have DE turned on so perhaps that would be an issue. I really just wanted to see if it would work with a Roku, given the low CPU power. I was able to stream 720p and SD files just fine. This would imply that all should work fine on a Synology NAS like the DS412+ or the DS1512+. I don’t know about 1280p though. Also, my 720p files were all h.264 profile 4 or under.

Philip pmcdunnough. I have set up Plex Server on Synology 1512+ and it is quite simple. (working with Roku) I would advise though that you download the latest version of the software from the Plex site and upload it manually, as the automatic version from the Synology web interface seems to be an older version. The Plex website offers a specific version when you choose Linux and then Synology. For photos, if you have a lot of them, it seems to take forever, i suggestyou leave the Synology to complete this task.

I have an older version of DSM (4.0-2219) running and apparently the new version, 4.0-2228, is much faster at creating thumbnails for photos. Still, as i am almost through the photo part, i have not upgraded DSM. DSM is part of Synology btw for those who do not know Synology. I have it working with both my Roku boxes.

I just found and installed the Plex channel and then it was straight forward. I tried running some videos over wireless and seemed to be fine. Photos/music was also fine. Only issue is that Plex seems not to find certain MP4 files in TV Shows, but finds these in Home Videos. I am not sure why, as i have not delved too deeply into how Plex works yet. Worse case scenario, you can have these films under Home Videos, or alternatively try and use MKV or other files for all TV Shows. Btw, I had some issues as i could not drill down into Volume1 (logical drive).

You just have to click on the sideways arrow to expand the list. Quite simple but it threw me and i did not see it. I have a Mac Mini Server running under OS X Mountain Lion.

I have installed PMS and a desktop client. It looks like PMS can manage all my movies and TV shows from a NAS (Buffalo).

They all show up in library. All mediafiles are in ISO format (DVD and no BD) except music. Playing music works perfect but movies are a mess.

Nothing works. PMS thinks my TV shows are all an old sort of Spiderman. Pity but Plex is unusable for me.

I also have XBMC (Eden version) and it works almost perfect. It would be nice to have Plex working because the idea with a server and client is so good. I’ve been able to watch movies in 720P with no problem,(forget about 1080P) now out of the blue this 720P will start doing the exact same problem as the 1080P (buffering issues) I dont know why is that now.I havent changed a single thing in my pc. I’ve try setting up in my mac mini and the same issue, I have a wireless router and have enabled the feature for streaming videos at 300mbts in a separate N network and still the same issue. I starting to think it might be my pc’s processor Phenom Triple core 2.1 Ghz 4 GB of ram. Somebody can throw me rope here.??? I’ve been using plex to stream to my ps3 without any issues!

Since one of there updates about 4 months ago they started supporting DLNA (specifically for PS3 and Xbox360). As long as your Server is up for the task of transcoding the movie (live.!) then it really works like a charm, best DLNA streamer out there in my opinion, they’ve done a great job also sending meta data over dlna!

(my server runs a i5 quad core processor to do the live transcoding, i can imagine that if your setup is slower it will struggle (a lot) when live transcoding 1080p files.) Gus. I know Gus, those are some pretty high requirements to get transcoding on the fly working right?

I can’t justify stepping up to the higher ranking Core i or AMD processors right now. At one point in time I was able to get PS3MediaServer on Ubuntu 10.04(dual AMD Opterons @ 2GHz) to transcode.mkv files on the fly to my PS3. Didn’t like the FF/RW results w/ MKV files though and started backing up using.m4v files. Plex was recommended to me and it looks like it has a lot of great features(Video Channels & Good web interface). It really has problems transcodingeven from Core2Duo 3GHz w/ 8GB RAM(Win7 64bit & Linux 64bit) to both PS3 & WD Live TV+(which supports mkv). Another problem I see when trying to view Apple Trailers or other shows through Video Channels on the PS3.

I get “folder could not be accessed” or “network error”. Some channels do work though. On the WD device, it just keeps spinning.

Maybe it’s a transcoding issue or maybe it’s a DLNA issue. Gonna bust open Wireshark and look @ plex logs to see if I can figure it out. I really wanted to see if I could use this with my Nexus 7 tablet, but don’t want to spend $5 for the appjust for it to not do everything I want. Lego Harry Potter 1 4 Nds Rom Download.