Plex

Plex is the preeminent personal media server. While they’ve locked some features behind a subscription and are branching out into cloud providers, it remains a solid choice. They have clients for a lot of different Tablets and TVs, and importantly make connecting your family to your home videos easy.

Installation

Plex has jumped on the pipe-to-shell installation method and you can now run this to install.

curl -LsSf https://repo.plex.tv/scripts/setupRepo.sh | sudo bash

This sets up the repo and installation you’d have done manually in the past.

Configuration

Unattended Upgrades

To allow unattended updates of plex, install the unattended upgrade package and a site to the Origins-Pattern section.

Note: The Plex installer may be doing this already at this point, but I’ve left this hear just in case.

sudo apt -y install unattended-upgrades

sudo vi /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern {
	...
	...
        "site=downloads.plex.tv";
};

Authorized IPs

Most private ranges are automatically granted access, but you may need to adjust.

sudo vim "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml"

... allowedNetworks="192.168.1.0/24" ...

Metadata Library

The metadata library can get very large. Many tens of gigabytes in some cases. So you may wish to relocate it for space or even security reasons.

sudo service stop plexmediaserver
sudo mv /var/lib/plexmediaserver /mnt/crypt
sudo ln -s /mnt/crypt/plexmediaserver /var/lib/plexmediaserver
sudo chown plex:plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver

Firewall Access

If you’re using Ubuntu and have UFW running, adjust as below.

sudo vim /etc/ufw/applications.d/plexmediaserver

[plexmediaserver]
title=Plex Media Server
description=Plex Media Server is the back-end media server component of Plex
ports=32400/tcp


# Add custom rules as needed
sudo ufw allow from xxx.xxx.xx.0/23 to any app plexmediaserver
sudo ufw deny from xxx.xxx.0.0/16 to any app plexmediaserver
sudo ufw allow plexmediaserver

Hardware Transcoding

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/intel-coffeelake-plex-hardware-transcoding-in-debian-unprivileged-lxc-container.132520/

Operation

Command Line Control

You can kick off scans via the command line, but you have to invoke the commands as the plex user.

#!/bin/bash

sudo su -c "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver;/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --scan" plex

You can also just become the plex user, of course, if it’s not too awkward

sudo -i -u plex
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --list --section 1

Searching for mis-matches in the DB

When you have a large collection, it becomes almost impossible to find where some items land at. You can however, search the database

sudo apt install sqllite3

sqlite3 "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases/com.plexapp.plugins.library.db"

select media_item_id,file from media_parts where file like "%Kid Party E07E01.mkv%";

select metadata_item_id,hints from media_items where id=1011881;

select title from metadata_items where id=173491;

Or for a complex join

SELECT
    metadata_items.title,media_parts.file
FROM
    metadata_items 

JOIN media_parts JOIN media_items

WHERE
    metadata_items.library_section_id=1
AND
    metadata_items.id=media_items.metadata_item_id
AND
    media_items.id=media_parts.media_item_id
AND
    media_parts.file LIKE "%Kid Party E07E01.mkv%";

Checking the Logs

tail -f /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Logs/Plex\ Media\ Server.log

Sources

Database info: https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-query-data-from-plex-on-a-mac/11636