Plex is a media player system and software suite consisting of many player applications for 10-foot user interfaces and an associated media server that organizes personal media stored on local devices. Integrated Plex Channels provide users with access to a growing number of online content providers such as YouTube, Vimeo, TEDTalks, and CNN among others. Plex also provides integration for cloud services including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or Copy.
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Plex for Linux is split into a closed-source server Plex Media Server, and an open-source client Plex Home Theater, a fork of the popular Kodi project.
With fast internet service and purchased physical media, a media server running Plex offers the best of both worlds. You can stream online content and make use of the media you've already bought and paid for. Stream online content and make use of the media you've already bought and paid for. Click To Tweet Why a Mac mini? Plex is a media player system and software suite consisting of many player applications for 10-foot user interfaces and an associated media server that organizes personal media stored on local devices. Integrated Plex Channels provide users with access to a growing number of online content providers such as YouTube, Vimeo, TEDTalks, and CNN among others. About Plex; Help; Browser Policy; Acceptable Use Policy; Privacy Policy; © 2021 Plex Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Watch Free Movies & TV Stream Smarter with Plex. When you are ready to ditch your streaming services and build your own in-home multimedia server, you have a lot of options. Investing in a prebuilt machine is a good option if you aren't tech-savvy, but for an equivalent cost you can build your own Plex media server that puts any pre-built option to shame.
Plex Media Server (PMS)
Installation
Install the plex-media-serverAUR package, or the plex-media-server-plexpassAUR package if you have a Plex Pass.
Setup
Start/enable the plexmediaserver.service systemd unit.
To begin configuring the Plex Media Server, browse to http://localhost:32400/web/.
To configure Plex Media Server remotely, you can first create an SSH tunnel (setup can only be done from localhost)
ssh ip.address.of.server -L 8888:localhost:32400
and then browse to http://localhost:8888/web/.
or if you are running apache, with a reverse proxy, by adding this configuration in httpd-vhosts.conf
Plugins
PMS can be expanded with additional plugins. For example, PMS can be used as an IPTV client with the IPTV plugin.
Plugins can be installed inside /var/lib/plex/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins.
Plex Live TV and DVR
Plex live TV requires a plexpass.
To enable live TV viewing and DVR support with plex, you must have one of the supported tuners listed on the support page and plex-media-server-plexpassAUR installed. PMS will automatically recognize any connected tuners.
The plex user needs to be part of the video group in order to access local tuners. This can be done by running usermod -a -G video plex
To enable IPTV support via m3u playlist install xTeVeAUR.
Security
It is recommended to store your media files outside of your home directory, as making it accessible to PMS would mean lowering its security. Having a separate /media or /mnt/media partition is a good setup for use with PMS.
You can further increase security via systemd, by editingplexmediaserver.service as follows:
ReadOnlyDirectories do not apply to any submount, you have to list them as well.Resource Management
Originally, PMS used ulimit to limit its allocated resources, however this is not compatible with running as a regular user. Instead, you can now set a maximum amount of memory via, again, systemd. For example, you can add:
to the file mentioned above.
Network
PMS and its DLNA server require several ports to be open:
- Plex Media Server: TCP 32400
- Plex DLNA Server: TCP 32469, UDP 1900
- Network Discovery: UDP 32410, 32412, 32413, 32414
- Bonjour/Avahi Network Discovery (legacy): UDP 5353
A short example with iptables:
In order to connect to Plex through on a standard http port, this command can be used (for port 8080):
Then you can connect directly to http://yourplexaddress:8080 on this port
Library Updates
Plex Media Server has a setting 'Update my library automatically' which can detect new media files as they are downloaded to your library. But as your library grows, these updates might stop working reliably. To fix, you need to increase the number of files non-root users are allowed to subscribe to via inotify. Create the file /etc/sysctl.d/40-max-user-watches.conf
and run sudo sysctl --system to apply without rebooting. Now plex should see any new files.
Troubleshooting
This article or section needs expansion.
SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL=debug, currently appears unreliable, see User talk:Alucryd#Plex (Discuss in Talk:Plex#)Logs are located in:
In case there are no logs or they are not helpful, you might want to launch PMS manually to get some terminal output:
Plex's WebUI returns 404
There may be a situation when updating Plex's WebUI will return 404 Not Found. To fix this you just need to restartplexmediaservice.service.
Plex Home Theater (PHT)
Previously known as Plex Media Center, Plex Home Theater is the software component used for a long time as the front-end media player for Plex's back-end server component Plex Media Server. This component came from a fork of XBMC Media Center software on May 21, 2008.
Official support for Plex Home Theater (from Plex, Inc.) has been discontinued in favour of Plex Media Player (based on MPV). However, Plex Home Theater was forked and has been developed further by the Open Source community under the name OpenPHT
Installation
Install the openphtAUR package.
Plex Home Theater can be launched by running plexhometheater.sh from your terminal.
Plex Media Player (PMP)
Plex Media Player is the current release of Plex's media client. It has officially replaced #Plex Home Theater (PHT) (which is still receiving bug fixes) and builds upon previous functionality, such as using mpv. Plex has made PMP available to all users and it has also become compatible with Kodi. Keep in mind, PMP is not open-source (unlike PHT).
Installation
Install the plex-media-playerAUR package.
Plex Media Server Online Streaming
Kodi and PleXBMC
With the PleXBMC add-on, Kodi can be used as a replacement for PHT.
Installation
Install the kodi[broken link: replaced by kodi-gbm] package, then follow the instructions over here.
Plex Online Server Hosting
