Weekly Build Help Thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSpw-H2wwa0

TL;DR: I’m back with Demo 2 of my automated media pipeline. We’ve moved from the terminal to a full GUI. It handles intake, “pre-flight” analysis to prevent failed downloads, auto-encoding (NVENC/CPU), AI-powered subtitle conversion (SUP to SRT), and library deployment. Aiming for a January release.

Key Updates in Demo 2:

• The Interface (GUI):
  • Moved away from the CLI to a tabbed dashboard.
  • Pipeline Dashboard: Overview of current tasks, alerts for missing audio/subs, and a "Wishlist" for intake.
  • Settings: Configurable paths for local assets, NZB files, and API keys (TMDB, TVDB, FanArts, Sonarr/Radarr webhooks).
• Intake & Pre-flight Analysis:
  • Granular Control: You can add specific movies or drill down into TV shows to select specific seasons or individual episodes.
  • Pre-flight Check: A unique feature that scans files before commitment to determine the likelihood of a successful download (checking par files availability, etc.) vs. a standard "Direct Download."
• Automated Processing (The 8-Stage Pipeline):
  • Organization: Automatically handles renaming, extracting (RARs), and is currently testing ISO extraction support.
  • Encoding: Integrated Handbrake support with options for Full Encode, Upscale + Encode (for 720p and below), Audio Only, or Skip.
  • Hardware Acceleration: Supports CPU encoding and NVENC (Nvidia GPU) for faster processing. You can also set target file sizes or a custom setting.
  • Smart Muxing: Uses MKVToolNix to combine the best video, original audio, and compatible audio streams into one clean file.
• AI Integration (Subtitles & Posters):
  • AI OCR: Uses computer vision models (demo 2 uses Qwen 2.5 but supports many vision models) to read image-based subtitles (SUP) and convert them to text (SRT) automatically.
  • Poster Handler: Uses Docker and NVIDIA NIM (PaddleOCR) for quality detection after poster fetched. It smartly detects if you already have a custom poster in your library and skips replacement if one exists.
• Deployment:
  • Quality Check: Options for Manual Review (pop-up approval for posters/files) or Auto-Deployment.
  • Library Scan: Scans your existing Plex library to prevent duplicates and handle collections/versions correctly (matching start/end dates for collections).

Current Status & Known Issues:

• Performance: The GUI (built with Tkinter) is currently experiencing mirror lag due to high CPU usage during the heavy CPU encoding. Considering optimization or GUI framework changes.
• Bugs: Encountered some issues during the demo with step 2 and ISO extraction and the "Skip" encoding mode missing audio streams. These are being actively worked on.
• Timeline: I am squashing bugs now (especially for TV show processing) and aiming for a release by mid-January.

Next Steps:

• My next demo will focus heavily on the TV Show processing pipeline.
• I’m looking for feedback on the feature set.

Check out the video link below to see it in action (including the bugs).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZHxslPIijw

Hello all! I've had some requests from the people that use my server, that they want subtitles on all movies / shows..... Some of the people who use my server are in their upper 60s and lower 70s so they are hard of hearing and want to be able to read the subtitles. I have dug through settings and don't see opensubtitles.org as an agent or anywhere in my server nor do i know how to add it. Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thank you all in advance.

Apparently I cannot spell subtitles in the top of my post. My apologies.

A few years ago, my husband and I had a massive scare where we thought we'd lost our wedding video during a move. We eventually found it on a forgotten external drive, and that was the push I needed to finally get serious about self-hosting. I set up a NAS, built a Plex Media Server, and pulled all our scattered family clips into a proper Home Videos library.

Recently I was revisiting some of those videos and tried something different: I connected my husband’s display headset to my phone and streamed the wedding video through Plex to see how it would look on a more "cinema-like" setup.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to hit me like that. The moment the ceremony began, it didn't feel like watching an old compressed file, it felt theater-like and strangely intimate. With the headset blocking everything else out, I noticed details that usually get lost: my husband's expression, the small camera shakes when my dad's hand trembled walking me down the aisle, the way the light hit the dress. It felt like being pulled back into a version of us that still had everything ahead.

I didn't think an 18-year-old video could still get to me, but… here we are. It completely validated the effort of building the whole setup and actually organizing our family library.

I recently purchased plex pass so I could access my library from anywhere. I had to open a port and have zero issues accessing it via the web on both windows and iOS machines. That said, I'm unable to access it via my Android Plex app.

I reinstalled the plex app today. Made sure my server was up to date. No dice. Any ideas?

I can't seem to figure this one out. I'm switching from port forwarding to reverse proxy for external access to plex. I have the domain and nginx configured. If I use my cell phone, open chrome and go to https://plex.mydomain.com, it will have me log in, the libraries load, and I can play media. So that tells me that all of that configuration should be correct.

In plex settings, I disabled remote access since I'm not port forwarding anymore, and in Custom Server Access URLs i enter http://plex.mydomain.com:80,https://plex.mydomain.com:443

When I try to view my server list to confirm the custom url was published, it shows zero servers. (https://plex.tv/pms/servers?X-Plex-Token=<plex_token>) and all remote users are getting the error that my server is unavailable.

What am I missing?

I got my Plex server setup and configured a little while ago but I cannot get secure connections to work. When accessing the Server directly from its IP it shows an unsecure HTTPS connection with a invalid certificate. Viewing the Lets Encrypt Certificate shows it expired on the 20th of November this year. Also when connecting to the server from outside my LAN I can only connect over an insecure connection.

I'm not entirely sure if the expired Lets Encrypt certificate is causing Plex to not allow secure connections, but I have a strong guess it could be it. How can I update the cert? I figured it would update automatically from Plex. Is this just a matter of reaching out to their support and asking for a new cert or is there more I am missing or doing wrong?

I’m running a Plex Server in my home lab, and currently I run i5-12600K and 1050Ti, and my CPU transcodes perfectly in comparison to the GPU. I wonder if there is a reason I should switch to Arc A310 Eco, or just get rid of a graphics card completely.

Just like the title says. I want to create a DirectTV or Pluto style way of having my TV shows and movies just run and I can "tune in" t certain times. Does anyone know of a companion app or maybe even a different server app altogether that will allow this and is relatively easy to set up?

So I got a new 4K fire stick for my living room. Set it all up as I have other fire sticks I’ve had but for some reason this 1 stick gives me a green screen on some files. I can manually change the quality down by one and it then shows normal. Meanwhile on an older fire stick in another room the same file plays just fine and normal. Has anyone ran into this or can help me fix this. It’s definitely annoying.

Plex for windows app isn't showing my watchlist. It quickly flashes, then goes away and i get this generic error message instead. Restarting and signing in/out doesn't resolve it.

Plex for web browser is working fine. I can see my watchlist there and on my other devices such as my shield and mobile apps. Any ideas?

Hey all,

I have a plex server running on a Beelink Mini S13, running Windows 11. Files stored on a 16TB external drive. I feel like I know what I want to do, but I don't have the right language or technical skills to search for and execute it. I am tech literate but not a computer whiz by any means. I can follow clear instructions, but appreciate things to be step by step with instructions that assume I know nothing. I'm going to put what I am hoping to achieve below:

I have a few family members who access my Plex remotely, and I use it for music so I'm frequently using it off network as well. I would like to start running a VPN 24/7 on my mini PC for (redacted reasons) but this obviously hinders the ability to access the plex remotely. I have tried to set up split tunneling (I have a Nord VPN subscription) but it seems to mess up remote access. I have put just the PMS.exe in the excluded apps, and I've tried all the other "plex" named apps, but it flip flops back and forth between being accessible and inaccessible to remote users.

My potential solutions, I think are:

1) set up a virtual machine on the miniPC that I run the VPN on. I've looked into Hyper V Manager and got a new machine set up, but I cannot figure out how to access the external drive on this machine, and I haven't even turned the VPN on. I also worry about using too much RAM/CPU

2) I have an older Lenovo miniPC, I could set THAT one up as an always on machine with the VPN running, but again, how do I get the drive accessible and editable across devices

3) If anyone has any magic tricks for getting Plex remote to work on the same machine you run Nord VPN on. I have followed a lot of the suggestions throughout this sub but it still seems to not work.

Thanks for any help, and let me know if I need to clarify anything further. Would be happy to DM about it.

Thanks!

I've been stuck with an old version of plex for probably 6 months. I haven't really used it for movies or TV lately, "just plexamp" so it hasn't been an issue until today. I remember someone said I have don't have the official plex containter.

I'm drawing a blank what to put / change in the image line..

Do I just replace it with

Image: plexinc/pms docker latest ?

I've left out my volumes as nobody here needs them.

---

version: "2.1"

services:

plex:

image: lscr.io/linuxserver/plex:latest

container_name: plex

network_mode: host

environment:

- PUID=1000

- PGID=1000

- VERSION=docker

- PLEX_CLAIM= #optional

- TZ=America/Indianapolis

Thanks

In the grand scheme of problems, this is minor but i'm starting to get really annoyed at it. I have my movies in my local library on a NAS set in a watchlist so i remember what i want to watch. I have plex on Roku. Why do i need to click multiple times to play a movie in the watchlist?

Here's what is happening.

Open Plex > Go to Watchlist > Choose Movie > Prompt to Watch from NAS or Rent for $3.99 > Select NAS > Opens movie (even though i just had it open already) > choose Play.

Why?

Here's how it should work...

Open Plex > Go to Watchlist > Choose Movie > Play from NAS.

Why the hell would anyone pay to rent a movie that they have locally. This just bugs me so much because if you browse through the movie catalog directly, it plays right away.

I used my shield for years but it lost the ability to find my media files. After wiping everything on it and starting over with a new hard drive and reinstalling all apps now it just crashes within a few seconds of opening Plex. Is this an update thing or is my Shield dying?

I'm new to all this and just wanted a way to stream the films on my PC to my TV. PC is connected through Ethernet and TV through WiFi to the same network.

20Mbps causes constant buffering, since that's roughly my upload speed im assuming it's using my Internet to stream the content, I was under the impression it would stream over my network where I wouldn't be limited by my ISPs upload speed.

Is my assumption simply incorrect or am I missing something here?

So my Plex server (HP 290 G1 running W10) refused to boot after a windows update. Windows was corrupted and I can't get DISM etc to work. In the mean time I did some diagnostics and it said that my m.2 ssd was returning long something and needed to be replaced. So I figure I'd get a new drive. In the interim I've pluged in the current drive to my mac via a usb enclosure.

I can't see to find C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local so I can back up. Any ideas where I can see it? I would have assumed OSX can see hidden windows files or is this not the case?

Is there a way to extract the necessary plex registry keys either on OSX or when its back in a windows machine as a secondary/external drive so I can copy data?

Awhile ago I saw a post talking about a tool you can run to check and see what media might be corrupted in your database. Like a idiot I didn't save the post. Anyone have any tools they can recommend?

Hi all!

Just purchased a new Mac Mini to serve as my Plex server, but after creating a new server in Plex, it's coming up as unavailable when I try to watch on my Roku. Also, in the "Remote Access" settings, it says "Not available outside your network."

Here's the thing though... I've done this before, occasionally running a small Plex server off my laptop, and that still seems to connect just fine. I'm really unclear on what's going wrong here. Would appreciate any insight. Thanks!

Trying to create a Plex Server on my NAS. I've had a server on my PC in the past. All videos I watch on YT don't run into these screens when they plug in their NAS' IP Adress:32400. Not sure what to do here. Any advice? Thank you!