Hi,
trying to get plex running on mypassport wireless pro – offline. configured plex itself as the many posts tell you to do, so that clients can connect without auth. While online, I authorized the entire subnet of 192.168.60.0/24 for that particular plex server.
client is roku at 192.168.60.100 but plex running on 192.168.0.1:32400 refuses to connect (sometimes), even when using the “media–>configure” admin interface of the wireless pro.
the only fix (when this happens) is to log into the WD admin interface (not plex) and bounce the server (turn plex streaming off and then back on).
Thanks as a last resort I did suspect corruption and reset the plex db
However the problem itself occurred after resetting the db… I had just finished a four day build of thumbnails so it sounds like the corruption happened during that process.
I didn’t build thumbnails this time and its been working for two days
It turns out that my server continues to experience this problem even after re-building my plex database. On random occurrences the device simply refuses to serve up media and the fix is to bounce the server using the “streaming” button on the admin page. This sounds like a systemic problem to me. is this a problem that one just needs to live with?
I did upgrade to the newest PMS release. the most persistent problem is that the server appears to be up – it displays all of the media thumbnails and shows the organization by folders and all of that. And for TV shows it even plays the show theme. but when I attempt to actually stream a media selection the Roku streamer reports “no playable items”, and the web interface reports, “An error occurred loading items to play.”
Sometimes, bouncing the server and waiting a month of Sunday’s works. sometimes it doesn’t.
If this is due to db corruption, then the WD disk itself may have defects or is degrading. But this does not sound like data corruption to me – it sounds like the WD is just painfully slow and it takes an eternity to come on line or recover from sudden aborts. I’m conditioned to expect snappy performance as with my Synology PLEX install and one just has to have a whole new set of (lowered) expectations with WD My Passport running PLEX.
just keeping everyone informed here in case there is interest. WD technical support has recommended re-formatting the Wireless Pro disk to NTFS to cure this problem (its true that I built my Plex database under the default exFAT). I’m aware that one of the issues with exFAT is file system fragmentation. However, its not clear to me why fragmentation itself would cause anything but performance problems – files are still there, even if splattered all over the disk a (spinning) disk. So I will certainly do the re-format but can anyone explain why exFAT itself would cause this problem and if in fact this is a known behavior issue with exFAT? And why would re-starting PLEX (not Linux) suddenly make files accessible to PLEX that were not before?
update: I re-formatted the drive to NTFS as directed by the Support team (a “long” format that took about 24 hours), and the problem still persists. The solution has gotten so bad that it supports only one stream before I have to bounce the server – and this is after the NTFS format and a complete Plex rebuild on top of fresh content. repeated testing caused the system to degrade to the point of being completely unusable – I couldn’t even reach the server via the ‘configure’ button in the UI and I could not even rebuild the Plex database.
I finally reset the unit to factory specs, rebuilt the entire plex database again (a 3-day task) and on the first try I got “no usable content” message from my Roku streaming stick running its Plex client.
WD support has been completely useless and they refuse to acknowledge that this is either undesired or unexpected; offering only that their engineering team might find a software solution if they are able to repeat the problem. I am six months into this purchase, so still under warranty, as useless as that is.
I conclude that the product is not suitable as a Plex server, as WD will not stand behind this product for that use case. Even when applying the considerable patience required to accommodate the slow hardware – all of which is understandable due to the battery power and primary purpose as a backup drive for photographers – it just fails. Apparently, WD expects and even predicts significant instabilities and behavior problems. I wish I had known this earlier;
my advice is don’t even consider this product if you have any reasonable Plex library. The concept is great and I really wanted this to work, but WD support has just sealed the deal for me, by essentially affirming that all of these problems are not problems at all but expected issues that may or may not continue and that improvement may or may not come with a software release.
I conclude that if a portable plex server is the goal, individual components can be purchased for a similar price, including the WiFi piece, UPS, and a small NAS, which will yield a better, more reliable solution.
