Plex Q&A

[stuckless]

This thread was created to answer some questions that came up in other thread that was unrelated to Plex. I've moved the discussion here.

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

What are you using with regards to PL.EX library detection? I’m finding that PLEX has a hard time deciding if a show is a movie or tv program, which scanner to use, etc. How many different drives do you collect programming from?

Originally Posted by stuckless

When I brought in my sage library, I just gave it my raw recording folders. My shows were recorded with season and episode in the filename. There were very few shows that I had to fix up. I don't use any other scanners, just the defaults in Plex. It's not perfect, but, as I said out of hundreds of series, maybe 5 I had to fix up. Now, I kept all my movies and TV in separate folders so, when I point to my TV folder it's only TV shows and I have separate library folder for Movies which only has movies. (and a separate folder for workout videos, home vidoes, etc). For the most part it was the same with sagetv, since I rarely recorded movies on sagetv.

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

Can you have multiple Movie or TV folders? I have stuff spread across 3 drives and a NAS.

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Is there a way to move this discussion to a better locale - I don’t want to steal the thread from tmiranda’s important notice.
That being said, I have two drives, two tuners, each fed by a cable box and satellite box. The drives gather independently from each tuner.
I guess the only way for PLEX to work as you have it would be to manually relocate my Sage recordings to dedicated TV/Movie folders AFTER Sage records them, so PLEX can digest properly? Do you see any other way to streamline my process?

[stuckless]

Can a plex library folder (ie, TV, Movies, etc) have more than one phsyical folder? Yes. When you are setting up a TV area, you can add different folders.

Plex can work by having both TV and Movie files in the same folder and then using multiple scanners, but, this would be problematic. I'm plex will mis-identify some shows and movies. But their web ui is generally pretty good to find/fix these.

[graywolf]

Can you confirm?
The HD300 / HD200 wouldn’t be able to be used with Plex or any of the other alternates

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by graywolf

Can you confirm?
The HD300 / HD200 wouldn’t be able to be used with Plex or any of the other alternates

Yeah, no HDxxx with Plex. You'd likely buy some MiBox or Nvidia Shield units as the front end.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Can a plex library folder (ie, TV, Movies, etc) have more than one phsyical folder? Yes. When you are setting up a TV area, you can add different folders.

Plex can work by having both TV and Movie files in the same folder and then using multiple scanners, but, this would be problematic. I'm plex will mis-identify some shows and movies. But their web ui is generally pretty good to find/fix these.

Thanks for the thread move. This is my problem with PLEX - when both m9vies and tv are in the same folder, it’s hit and miss what shows up as a description. How would you set up a Sage system like mine, to also best support PLEX’s architecture?
One satellite box, one cable box, each feeding a tuner, each recording their material to independent HDD’s. The only thing I can think of would be manually moving every recording right after they get recorded.

[NetworkGuy]

Are you using the PLEX DVR for scheduling and recording shows? If so, how does it compare with SageTV?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Thanks for the thread move. This is my problem with PLEX - when both m9vies and tv are in the same folder, it’s hit and miss what shows up as a description. How would you set up a Sage system like mine, to also best support PLEX’s architecture?
One satellite box, one cable box, each feeding a tuner, each recording their material to independent HDD’s. The only thing I can think of would be manually moving every recording right after they get recorded.

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

Are you using the PLEX DVR for scheduling and recording shows? If so, how does it compare with SageTV?

In all fairness if I were still recording shows I would not be using plex I only moved to plex because I cancelled my satellite TV and as a result, I have no tuners, and as such no need for SageTV. Once that happened I moved my content to TV and Movie folders and then had plex scan it. From there if I add a movie it does in the movie folder and tv in the tv folder. I'm not big on fiddling with stuff, I'll change how I do things, if it means less work

I am considering testing OTA but, where I live has such few channels, and in 2 years I'm looking to move and where I'm going has even less OTA

[stuckless]

FYI to plex users. I've been running plex for awhile now, and it's not perfect by any stretch, but, it's getting the job done. Yesterday I had a bit of a scare. My search (in the webui) was not returning stuff that I knew was there, and, I added a new episode of show (for my wife) and plex refused to bring the file, even though the video file was good. I've had sagetv do this as well from time to time, but this is the first time I've seen it on plex.

I tried many different things... but in the end the thing that worked was doing a "repair" on the plex database. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201...rupt-database/

This is not something that you can just click a button for, but, the steps aren't too bad. It basically involves dumping the database, deleting it, and then re-importing it, all using the sqlite commandline tools.

I'm happy to report that doing this fixed the import issue and the search issue. If you are running plex on unraid, then it appears the sqlite3 command is installed by default, which was handy.

Just thowing this out there, since there are likely a few sagetv users that are in the process of trialling plex as well.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by stuckless

FYI to plex users. I've been running plex for awhile now, and it's not perfect by any stretch, but, it's getting the job done. Yesterday I had a bit of a scare. My search (in the webui) was not returning stuff that I knew was there, and, I added a new episode of show (for my wife) and plex refused to bring the file, even though the video file was good. I've had sagetv do this as well from time to time, but this is the first time I've seen it on plex.

I tried many different things... but in the end the thing that worked was doing a "repair" on the plex database. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201...rupt-database/

This is not something that you can just click a button for, but, the steps aren't too bad. It basically involves dumping the database, deleting it, and then re-importing it, all using the sqlite commandline tools.

I'm happy to report that doing this fixed the import issue and the search issue. If you are running plex on unraid, then it appears the sqlite3 command is installed by default, which was handy.

Just thowing this out there, since there are likely a few sagetv users that are in the process of trialling plex as well.

would uninstalling and reinstalling have fixed the issue as well?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

would uninstalling and reinstalling have fixed the issue as well?

You mean uninstalling the docker container? I don't think so, since, it is the database that is corrupt and that remains even after you uninstall. If you mean deleting the show and re-adding.. then I tried that first, but that didn't do anything.

[KryptoNyte]

I just set up a quick Plex server to see how it works. It's adopting movies and TV show directories now - it looks like that may take a while.

Is the lifetime pass basically what I'm looking to purchase to use the remote streaming features of Plex? It appears that I can only watch 1 minute of a media file without a 'pass.'

If it can handle large media libraries and transcode and stream well, then this looks like the one.

[wayner]

Plex is pretty good - in my opinion it has a few downsides compared to SageTV.

1. It isn't really a PVR so isn't good for recording TV.
2. You need to have metadata to import shows so this doesn't work for sports and other show without metadata.
3. While watching you can't SkipFwd as easily as you can with SageTV. That is crucial for me as I watch a lot of sports (or at least I used to when there actually were sports).

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by wayner

That is crucial for me as I watch a lot of sports (or at least I used to when there actually were sports).

I watched a stone-skipping competition a few days back on one of the ESPN stations. No joke.

[KryptoNyte]

Is there a way to get rid of the server web UI showing "On Plex" content, so that I just see my own media? Maybe after I pay ...

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

Is there a way to get rid of the server web UI showing "On Plex" content, so that I just see my own media? Maybe after I pay ...

Do you see an "unpin" option in the 3 dot menu for the item? (if so, select that)

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by wayner

Plex is pretty good - in my opinion it has a few downsides compared to SageTV.

1. It isn't really a PVR so isn't good for recording TV.
2. You need to have metadata to import shows so this doesn't work for sports and other show without metadata.
3. While watching you can't SkipFwd as easily as you can with SageTV. That is crucial for me as I watch a lot of sports (or at least I used to when there actually were sports).

Totally agree on the FF/RW operation. Really awful. Sage, 15-year-old-Sage, still WAY ahead of the competition here. Is there a way in PLEX to get rid of all the shiny pictures which eat up my screens real-estate?

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Totally agree on the FF/RW operation. Really awful. Sage, 15-year-old-Sage, still WAY ahead of the competition here. Is there a way in PLEX to get rid of all the shiny pictures which eat up my screens real-estate?

On the server web UI there is a way to view with a list rather than grid, which eliminates the shiny pictures. On the Firestick interface, I can't find a similar option for list, it only appears as grid with the pictures.

[KryptoNyte]

I do wonder about media servers that have worked hard at transcoding features for remote viewing (such as Plex) - I'm just not sure how they would implement a smooth fast forward, somewhat like Sage. They would almost have to have a 2nd process running that is automatically picking some key frames and transcoding those in advance specifically for use in fast forward/back.

Are there any streaming services today that provide a nice, smooth fast forward/back?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I do wonder about media servers that have worked hard at transcoding features for remote viewing (such as Plex) - I'm just not sure how they would implement a smooth fast forward, somewhat like Sage. They would almost have to have a 2nd process running that is automatically picking some key frames and transcoding those in advance specifically for use in fast forward/back.

Are there any streaming services today that provide a nice, smooth fast forward/back?

I've used plex many times from my hotel room using complimentary wifi connected back to my server. I can't say that I've noticed issues with fast forward or rewind. Granted I've never been able to get sagetv to work remotely so, I can't really compare to that.

Now, sagetv natively does do a better job of skipping, but, but plex doesn't seem horrible. In fact I right arrow skip quite a bit in plex and feels decent. Not at fast as sagetv but not bad either. Sagetv can skip the way it does because it invented its own streaming protocol.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Do you see an "unpin" option in the 3 dot menu for the item? (if so, select that)

Yes, thanks. I think I figured it out.