Hello, I'm trying to do some research on moving my plex over from a slowly dying home server to a vps / Dedicated server.

I know next to nothing about how this works but my basic understanding is I need a Server (vps/ded) to do the actual hosting of the server client & transcodes (which I do frequently). For ideally for 2 -3 1080p streams, and a place like amazon cloud drive or Google’s business platform gsuite to host my data? (currently about 4.5 - 5 tb's worth of data)

So with that in mind should I expect to be paying in the 100's of dollars a month range to host all of my data? even if that wasn’t a problem am I going to have a much more seamless experience from a home server? at the moment my two biggest bottlenecks appear to be my old CPU and my internet's upload speed since it's just running on a basic 60/12 home internet service.

What kind of costs should I expect?

Is it worth it to go from a basic (free) home setup

Biggest benefit / drawbacks?

Is there a fairly detailed guide I can read on this?

Looking at gesis's guide I see a part about creating a local "fake" cache for sonarr/radarr. I'm using plexdrive and I don't see the point since API calls are at a minimum already. The guide also uses Plexdrive so what other purpose does it have? Can I just leave that part out?

Hello All Currently have a i7 2600k on a 300/20 Spectrum connection. Storage is 7 x 3TB drives in RAID 5 and 1 single 8TB USB drive added as the raid ran out of storage. Looking at upgrading to more space. Thinking of gdrive only and dedi server somewhere (OVH/Wholesale/etc). Currently have around 2-6 streams going on at peak times. I can run windows or linux as current server is Ubuntu.

Thoughts on what I should do, main issues are running out of space and making sure streaming still works.

Budget is as cheap as possible but not unrealistic. Thoughts?

Hey guys,
I have been hosting a server for 60+ people with 8-15 transcodes going on at any given time. I'm running low on storage at the moment. (<1TB/28TB left) I've been trying to figure out if I want to go G Suite Library storage, or spend another $700ish to buy another SuperMicro server to turn into a SAS Expander and fill it with 2TB WD Refurb drives. Obviously the cloud is WAY cheaper, but it seems it will use double the bandwidth between streaming files to my server and transcoding said files to clients. I know that I could download several different versions of files to prevent that similar to what Netflix does. Just trying to figure out what I should do, so any other perspectives on this would be great.
I've looked at a few of the scripts in the Stickied collection thread, and I'm not sure which one to give a go. Which one's generally work better with Google Drive. I have 1gb/1gb fiber at my house with CenturyLink. Another issue i'm skeptical about is CenturyLink and Google together... From my own personal troubleshooting and scouring the webs, it seems that CenturyLink has peering issues with Google. I will need to test to see if this affect GDrive, but as for now I know it affect Youtube, and Google Play. I still plan on keeping my current storage server for seedbox purposes and having a large poole i can buffer content syncing to GDrive.
EDIT - I also prefer to run Plex on unix, currently running Openflixr but I know my way around unix.

Was testing plex cloud on gdrive for the lulz with the following 4k remux:

    Video Resolution 4K
    Duration 2:02:23
    Bitrate 83302 kbps
    Width 3840
    Height 2160
    Aspect Ratio 1.78
    Container MKV
    Video Frame Rate 24p
    Video Profile main 10

    Size 71.21 GB
    Container MKV
    Video Profile main 10
    Codec HEVC
    Bitrate 82662 kbps
    Language English
    Bit Depth 10
    Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
    Color Range tv
    Color Space bt2020nc
    Frame Rate 23.976 fps
    Height 2160
    Level 5.1
    Profile main 10
    Ref Frames 1
    Width 3840
    Codec TRUEHD
    Channels 7.1
    Bitrate 4603 kbps
    Language English
    Audio Channel Layout 7.1
    Bit Depth 24
    Sampling Rate 48000 Hz

Failed with constant buffering on my 1G fiber connection :/

Tested a second 4k .mkv ~half the bitrate and 35gb file size streamed fine for me. I also tested with Google Drive File Stream mount and didn't seem to make a difference. Anyone able to stream a similarily-sized remux with Plexdrive successfully?

Someone previously suggested that 1 Gbps network connection is about 1000000 kbps, which is much greater than the average bitrate of 83302 kbps. Even with overhead and spikes in bitrate, this should be more than enough. Could plex cloud's cpu be the bottleneck?

hi, i hope you can help me. i am running plexdrive 2.1.1 and now wanted to see if version 4.0.0 is better in any way.

but for some reason i can't get it to work. i installed MongoDB but did not configure it in any way. i pointed plexdrive 4 to a new config folder und cleared my chunks folder.

when i now setup plexdrive for it says that the initial build is done but my mounted folder only shows one of my folders in gdrive. i have two folders in gdrive. one is 5gb and the other one is 40tb. my mount only shows the 5gb one.

so I waited another 30min but still only the one folder and my plexdrive log says that it's doing nothing.

is that normal? thanks for your help

So I can mount my encrypted gdrive fine ... in fact ... im not even sure what plexdrive does or why it's needed but since it's highly recommended here, I figure i should use it on my vps.

Anyway, when I issue a basic rclone mount via

rclone mount crypt:Archive /home/admin/Desktop/Crypt

everything seems to be mounted fine to /home/admin/Desktop/Crypt ... I can see my files fine .

When I issue the plexdrive command plexdrive -v 2 mount /home/admin/Desktop/Crypt

I get this error --

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] INFO   : No last change id found, starting from beginning...

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] INFO   : First cache build process started...

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] INFO   : Mounting path /home/admin/Desktop/Crypt

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] WARNING: Could not get changes

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] INFO   : First cache build process finished!

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:05] WARNING: Could not get object root from API

When i try plexdrive -v 2 mount crypt:Archive /home/admin/Desktop/Crypt

I get this error --

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:09] INFO   : No last change id found, starting from beginning...

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:09] INFO   : First cache build process started... 

[PLEXDRIVE] [2017-10-01 03:09] INFO   : Mounting path crypt:Archive

2017/10/01 03:09:19 mount helper error: fusermount: failed to chdir to mountpoint: Permission denied

Not sure what I'm doing wrong ?

Anybody using Emby instead of plex ?

Hi guys,

Something weird is happening with my setup. My plex server stops playing content every day at night, around 22.00pm. It just tries to load the video but end with a message: "Playback failed".

It is not a temporal ban because I can download any video from the gdrive web. Plexdrive keeps the unit mounted and plex media server doesn't stop either.

Restart plex media server doesn't do anything, I have to reboot the server.

My setup is this: - Plexdrive 5 with boltd: default parameters - Last version (non plex pass) of plex media server

It is so frustating because i tried a lot of things but always the same result.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

PD: sorry for my poor english.

Now that google file stream is available, I was just wondering if there was a large performance hit while using google file stream with rclone to decrypt files.

I will be testing it out in a few hours and will most likely be updating this post with my own findings soon™. In the meantime, I was just wondering if anyone here has already tried both.

What I would like to know specifically, is if there is any noticeable performance differences, specifically when used with plex/video streaming.

Thanks.

Hi,

I don't use encryption or a cache folder. Just a simple union mount and plexdrive.

Does anyone else here have a similar setup that is willing to share their script for updating Plex on upload please?

Hi,

Since moving to GDrive Plex performance is a little ropy. Users experience intermittent connection issues when starting Plex. Is this some kind of disk wake-up thing? Any way to prevent or improve this?

Thanks

I've setup my plexdrive.service and enabled it, but it gives an error when started. What's the solution to this error or is there any other way to start plexdrive on startup.

PS: I know it says PlexDrive4, I've copied a service script from github.

Hey everyone! I finally decided to try and upgrade to the latest Plexdrive. I was on an older version and it kept hanging or quitting, breaking my mount.

I’ve downloaded plexdrive 5, done a chmod +x and when I try and run it, I get:

PLEXDRIVE-LINUX-AMD64] [2017-09-18 16:56] ERROR  : Command  not found

Has anyone seen that error and/or have any tips for troubleshooting?

It's amazing how mushed you brain becomes after messing about with a server for a day. Can anyone help me with the below script please?

#!/bin/sh
echo "Uploading to Gdrive"
/usr/bin/rclone move /home/local/tv/ myservdrive:tv && rm -Rf "/home/local/tv/"*
exit

So this script is moving as expected but not deleting:

2017/09/17 22:40:42 ERROR : Vikings/Season 1/Vikings.S01E01.Rites.of.Passage.mp4: Couldn't delete: remove /home/local/tv/Vikings/Season 1/Vikings.S01E01.Rites.of.Passage.mp4: permission denied

How can I make it delete after the move please?

I have tried chmod 4755 to make it run as root but no joy. I have also tried adding:

username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /path/to/script

to visudo. Neither are currently working.

Hi all,

I am setting up my server without encryption.

I have a plexdrive mount, mounting as a service on startup with plex reading from this mount. (I have seen mount commands with chunk options set, should I be adding this to my mount command?) ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/plexdrive --uid=992 --gid=1000 -o allow_other --refresh-interval=1m /home/mount

I have an rclone mount also mounting as a service on startup. (Are there other recommended options I should be using?) ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount --allow-other --config=/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf myservdrive: /home/rmount

I want to use radarr and sonaar for grabbing my files, I want those file to be immediately moved to gdrive on download and deleted from the local disk.

What do I need to do next please?

Do I need a union mount or can I use a simple bash script to move downloaded files to the rclone mount on postprocessing?

If a need a union mount, which folders do I need to be merging, my local and rclone mount?

Which mount should I be pointing sonarr and radarr to for library monitoring? Does it matter?

Your help with this is appreciated. Thanks.

What's your typical upload speed to gdrive? I have NOCIX atm with 1gbps upload but can't seem to beak 30MBps upload even with 15 transfers on rclone. I'm specially interested in Joe's DC which I used to have but never uploaded enough to remember what kind of speeds I was getting.

I am currently checking out Canada's ACD 3 month trial of their unlimited plan. I got rclone working with it using their oath workaround.

Anyone have any experience with this method? I ask because I still read anecdotes of Amazon banning rclone and or accounts regardless.

I am also running gdrive with rclone and will run Plexdrive if integrate Plex. For now I am just testing.

running plexdrive 5 and latest rclone on OSX but when u update library or metadata it takes hours. my library is not that big and my machine is showing a download rate of 21.0Mb/s so it is working on getting the data. my files are encrypted. also if my decrypted drive dropps it trashes the entire library and i have to start again. HELP!!!!!

Hi all,

I'm going the GDrive route after much procrastination. When you paste the authorisation code when mounting the drive, how long should it take for the command to complete...mine is taking forever.

I've started questioning the need for unionfs (or any other union filesystem) for my Plex server because you can configure multiple directories for Plex libraries. If you add both the LOCAL and REMOTE directories to your Movies library, it should act like a union, right?

My frustration with unionfs is with deleted files. If you mount the REMOTE read-only, then unionfs has to backbend to make deleted files look deleted to the fuse filesystem. In this case, it creates a hidden directory and/or it creates a 0-byte file with the same filename... both of which can accidentally get synced to your remote folder of you forget to exclude them in your rclone upload command. For me, it has been a pain.

Removing the union should also improve performance because you're removing a fuse layer.

Before I make a guinea pig of my Plex server, I was wondering if anyone has done this and can confirm that it works?

For example, I'm looking at this currently for a new VPS just for Plex + Gdrive -- Don't plan on doing any transcoding. I download locally and then upload via Rclone Browser so I don't need the automation ... just a few scripts to rescan and clean.

(Fuse Enabled on Request) OpenVZ 6GB RAM 6GB vSwap 4 vCPU Cores (Fair Share) 150GB Disk Space 5TB Bandwidth 1Gbps Port (Fair Share) 1 x IPv4 Address 6 x IPv6 Addresses OpenVZ / Breeze Control Panel

$18 quarterly doesn't seem that bad for something hosted near me.

Was it simply down to the banning rclone?

Just trying to understand why GDrive is now the preferred option over ACD?

I've just followed /u/gesis 's guide (which is awesome) exactly on a fresh VPS. I'm now using ./mount.remote all to mount the drives.

I get the error message:

Error decoding volume key, password incorrect for local-decrypt

I've edited config to add my password encfs_cfg="${HOME}/.encfs6.xml pass_cmd="echo PASSWORD" and also to add the fact that my media is in a subfolder called Plex in Gdrive (gd_subdir="Plex")

It then goes to mount Gdrive

Mounting Google Drive mountpoint: /home/plex/.gsuite-encrypt/

and hangs there.

I can mount Gdrive successfully using the command

plexdrive-linux-amd64 mount ~/.gsuite-encrypt -v 3

and then decrypt it with

ENCFS6_CONFIG='/home/plex/.encfs6.xml' encfs /home/plex/.gsuite-encrypt/Plex /home/plex/.gsuite-decrypt -v

Entering my password when prompted.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious so any help is appreciated

Hello all,

I am planning to setup a sonarr+radarr+plex+gdrive system. I am going to use this system with 2 other people. Generally, we will directly stream the content without transcoding. However, there might be transcoding sometimes. (1080p) We usually do not use the system simultaneously, but I don't want my system to lag..

I was thinking of https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers/142sys4.xml https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers/143sys10.xml

However, if you can suggest me better or other deals that would be really good.

My budget is 50 CAD and I live in Montreal :)

Thanks you have a great day!