Plex

The last few days, I’ve been re-creating my ceph cluster from scratch.
After a first disaster in january, leading to the loss of a placement group (over 640), and most recenty the loss of my only monitor, I decided to start from a clean slate.
After two days importing a few terabytes, the main services are back up, and I took the afternoon to install for the very first time a streaming solution I’ve been hearing good things about: Plex.

As far as I can tell, it works pretty well.
Two things I would complain about, starting with the debian packaging, that assume there is no systemd on debian – ironically, the script handles systemd on ubuntu after 14.04: a test is missing to be fully jessie-compliant.
The second thing may be a PEKAC, I still need to investigate. It appears when I’m streaming more than two media, I get errors about the server not being able to open the source media.

Plex lets you browse your media libraries. Scanning directory trees, matching files for either Movies, TV Shows, Music or Home Movies.
Beforehand, you would need to ensure your libraries are properly named, according to Plex standards. If you prefer keeping your layout intact, you may write some script linking your media to some alternative library root, allowing plex to properly deal with your medias.

Starting with my movies and series the first day, I quickly wrote an other script linking my music medias to a directory according to plex music libraries naming directives.
Checking out all plex menus, I ended up configuring Channels, connecting to my YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud accounts.

In the end, Plex is very much more, than I was expecting in the first place.
It’s doing quite well, in everything I have tested right now. The video player easily allows you to switch audio track, subtitle track, media quality. Transcoding may induces relatively huge CPU load. When streaming starts jerking, look at the “settings-like” icon, either pick Original transcoding quality, or just lower your bitrate.

Last comment: note the runtime user of Plex need to have write access to your libraries directory – folders not allowing writes would not be scanned. Even if I’ve found no proof of anything being written there, ATM.

And let’s finish on a script used with some SickBeard backend, rewriting the your episodes metadata (mtime) to match their actual release date.