Hello.

 

I just salvaged my 5 year old: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz, 2gb RAM and setup unRaid.

Before I spend money upgrading to plus or pro & buying hard drives

I'm running various test to ensure this is going to be worth it.

 

I'm running into a problem where my videos will play for about 15 mins, stop and go back to the menu screen.

I will play again and it will do the same.  Will not play more then 10-15 mins without stopping.

 

Anyone can help me why this may be happening???

 

Thank you.

I haven't seen that particular issue, but a Core 2 Duo is really kind of slow for Plex.

ermmm i don't know about that.  should be enough.

 

That said, we need to know more about your setup.  Like are you transcoding or trying to direct play?  MKV?  DTS? BD Rips?  Are you running other plugins?  Where did you set your tmp directory to?  Not flash I hope.

 

Did you try OTHER video files? 

 

Frankly this likely belongs more in the Plex forums than on the unraid forums.

I'm playing MKV and AVI's.

Not running any plug ins.

 

I'm actually very new to unRaid.  Not even sure what other plug ins are out there OR if I need them.

Really only setup to serve as plex server as well as backing up my RAW files of family pics.

 

when you say you hope that my tmp file is not in flash...how do I know where it is??

I see the my library directory is default to /tmp/library  AND  tmp is under /tmp..

does this mean it is set to the flash drive??

 

Is there good how to guide for newb..i mean real newb like me for unRaid???

 

Thank you guys.

/tmp is in ram. It's possible your running out of ram. Also with the directories being in ram you'd have to rebuild your library after every boot.

 

Another possible issue is the nic. You should post a syslog for analysis. Search the forum for the instructions on how to do so

how do I change it to my disk1???

Is that recommended or possible??

recommended = app and tmp on cache

ok = on disk 1 .. because then you are putting it on parity and that means spinning up two disks and slower writes which "could" be an issue for transcoding at high bitrates.

 

Go here for more info http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/42513-0963-for-unraid/

 

Note that the first post shows "/mnt/cache/..."  if you don't have a cache drive then you'd use "/mnt/disk1..."

thank you so much.  I have it set on disk1 for now until I decide to u/g to plus or pro.

 

will it be stupid if i used unraid without parity??

is that defeating the purpose of unraid??

I only wanted the server to host plex to my gtv and iPad.

 

Aren't there better options to just run those applications + large amounts of unprotected storage?

 

If not, then sure it is not stupid to run unraid w/out parity if you don't care about data protection and all you want is a freely expandable JBOD NAS [shrug] 

thank you so much.  I have it set on disk1 for now until I decide to u/g to plus or pro.

 

will it be stupid if i used unraid without parity??

is that defeating the purpose of unraid??

I only wanted the server to host plex to my gtv and iPad.

 

I had plex running on my protected-array (disk1) for a bit, and found it was fast enough for transcoding - but I only ever had one stream going at a time, and my hardware is different than what you've mentioned, so your results may vary (I have a more current Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM). I've noticed the way plex works is to transcode the entire file on the server side at maximum speed even though the player may be streaming at a much slower rate - so it stays way ahead of the player (roku, in my case). On my unraid server it pulls about 170% cpu while transcoding, but finishes relatively quickly (compared to the length of the movie), and then the main plex process just serves up the transcoded file which it has stored in a temporary location, at very low cpu.

 

However, since then, I've moved plex off my array because it is very chatty and constantly writing to log files and updating its plug-ins, thereby preventing spin-down of the drive (data & parity). What I've done (and others) is put plex on a NON-array drive (i.e. not protected and not part of the array configuration). I've taken an old 2.5" laptop drive that I had lying around, and mounted it outside the protected array. Note: A non-array drive is different from a cache drive, and you can do it with the "free" basic unraid license. Possibly this is more complicated, but I've never tried the cache drive approach so I cannot compare.

 

victor

 

 

So are you using the SNAP plug-in to do that or are the drives mounted ok for internal use without it?  That is as opposed to NSPA which is meant to share out non-array disks over the network.

Just as a point of reference, I have a Core i5 2500 system with 8GB of ram. I use a cache disk as well.  I have had 4 simultaneous HD streams running at a time with no problems.  2 were local and 2 were remote.  I agree with the idea that 2GB of ram may be contributing to the issue.  The processor should be ok.

So are you using the SNAP plug-in to do that or are the drives mounted ok for internal use without it?  That is as opposed to NSPA which is meant to share out non-array disks over the network.

 

I'm not using SNAP, as I only have the drive mounted for internal use as a "scratch" disk, and don't need to share it out (I use it for Plex and other temp storage). I have a command in my unraid "go" script to mount the drive when I start the unraid server as follows (the drive is formatted reiser fs):

 

#

# NON_ARRRAY DRIVES

# mount non-array scratch disk

mkdir -p /mnt/scratch

mount -t reiserfs -o rw,noatime,user_xattr /dev/disk/by-id/ata-FUJITSU_MHY2160BH_K999-part1 /mnt/scratch

echo "vm: mounted scratch disk" | logger

 

 

And then I have configured Plex to use the scratch disk (e.g. my plex library directory is /mnt/scratch/apps/Plex/Library and temp is /mnt/scratch/apps/Plex/Temp ).

 

Note: I have considered sharing out the scratch disk so I can back-up the Plex library from my other computer - in which case, SNAP may be simpler - but for now I just rsync a copy to my array once a week.

Old thread, but I have a similar problem.  Just set up unRAID and I've got a weird problem.  When playing music my Apple TV plex client will typically play one track and then a few seconds of the next and then stop.  If I restart on the second track it will play that track and a few seconds of the next and then stop again.  Playing a video file works fine.  This is a problem that I didn't have when I used my windows server as storage.  To my surprise I have the exact same behaviour when running a new Plex server in a docker container on the unRAID box too.  Any ideas ?

1 minute ago, sindre said:

Old thread, but I have a similar problem.  Just set up unRAID and I've got a weird problem.  When playing music my Apple TV plex client will typically play one track and then a few seconds of the next and then stop.  If I restart on the second track it will play that track and a few seconds of the next and then stop again.  Playing a video file works fine.  This is a problem that I didn't have when I used my windows server as storage.  To my surprise I have the exact same behaviour when running a new Plex server in a docker container on the unRAID box too.  Any ideas ?

Why on earth did you necropost (over 4 years ago, wonder how many versions of plex since then) on a thread in a section that is for an older version of unRAID (that doesn't even support dockers), especially when there are plenty of plex docker support threads that are current? Figure out which plex docker you're running and post to that support thread, giving us your docker run command.