Tag Archives: plex

Random Short Take #107

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Random short take #107. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

  • This article from Matt Allford struck a chord. I have an awful lot of USB cables in my house, and I have no idea what the specs of most of them are.
  • Speaking of things I only have a superficial understanding of, this article from Christian on Intel Arc SR-IOV hardware transcoding with Plex on Proxmox VE was great.
  • Still using an Apple Time Capsule? You’re out of luck and in luck at the same time, as is explained over at The Register.
  • Speaking of backup and recovery, this article about Backblaze has me questioning everything I’m doing to keep stuff safe at home. I’ve checked that my iCloud data is protected (and recoverable), but only because the machine I have Backblaze installed on has downloaded copies of that data. For the stuff I keep on Dropbox and Google Drive, it doesn’t seem as straight forward. Not that I’d ever recommend you only keep data with one provider. Maybe I need to write something more about this, if only to confirm that I’m doing correctly myself.
  • In resilience news (is that really a category?), this was an interesting article on AWS and what’s happening in the Middle East. The response from AWS has been fascinating, as have some of the hot takes from so-called “disaster recovery experts”. I’m looking forward to talking with customers in Western Queensland about the risk matrix they’ve drawn up that has them in a tizzy about losing three availability zones. There’s preparedness and then there’s how you recover, I guess.
  • Missing using FireWire with the most recent version of macOS? This article from Jeff Geerling might be of use if you still have a MiniDV camera you need to connect to something. It just won’t be with macOS.
  • Speaking of things not working after updates, you could always follow John Birmingham’s advice and just never update. But I’m not sure that’s really sustainable.
  • I think Netflix does some really cool stuff from a technical perspective, but for the most part the catalogue seems to be trash. So these kinds of posts from people rediscovering physical media are always nice to read.

Plex Media Server – Enable Hardware Acceleration

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This one should be relatively short. I recently added a GPU to my Plex server (the NVIDIA GTX-1650 – maybe this one). In and of itself, that’s not so exciting, although the shuffling of things around to get all of the SATA drives spinning while making use of the single PCIe slot on the board was a bit of fun to be sure. I ended up using a M.2 to SATA adapter that actually works quite well. In any case, I thought it was simply a matter of turning on hardware acceleration on the Plex server, as Debian seemed to have detected the card. To do this, go to Settings – Transcoder and then tick “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding”.

I noticed, however, that when I was watching various films, the GPU wasn’t doing anything. There’s a good explanation on the Plex website about how this works, and how this should work, that you can read here. The solution to my problem was to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. There are comprehensive instructions for the various flavours of Debian available here. In my case, I’m using Debian 12, so I ran this command:

apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree

Once I did that (and following the reboot, etc), I noticed that Plex was actually using the GPU to do video encoding (where required) and everything was great. Of course, in my home I want to be using Direct Play, but if I’m outside my home I’ll generally need the server to do some transcoding to meet bandwidth limitations.

The NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers also give you access to a tool called nvidia-smi, which is handy if you want to see what’s happening with the GPU too.

Have I found this to be a great improvement in my remote Plex experience? It’s too soon to say. But I’ll report back when I’ve done some more testing. And yes, I know the GPU is old, but so is the server, and so am I for that matter.

Random Short Take #94

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Welcome to Random Short Take #94. Let’s get random.

Random Short Take #78

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Welcome to Random Short Take #78. We’re hurtling towards the silly season. Let’s get random.

macOS Catalina and Frequent QNAP SMB Disconnections

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TL;DR – I have no idea why this is happening as frequently as it is, what’s causing it, or how to stop it. So I’m using AFP for the moment.

Background

I run a Plex server on my Mac mini 2018 running macOS Catalina 10.15.6. I have all of my media stored on a QNAP TS-831X NAS running QTS 4.4.3.1400 with volumes connected to macOS over SMB. This has worked reasonably well with Catalina for the last year (?) or so, but with the latest Catalina update I’ve had frequent (as in every few hours) disconnections from the shares. I’ve tried a variety of fixes, and thought I’d document them here. None of them really worked, so what I’m hoping is that someone with solid macOS chops will be able to tell me what I’m doing wrong.

 

Possible Solutions

QNAP and SMB

I made sure I was running the latest QNAP firmware version. I noticed in the latest release notes for 4.4.3.1381 that it fixed a problem where “[u]sers could not mount NAS shared folders and external storage devices at the same time on macOS via SMB”. This wasn’t quite the issue I was experiencing, but I was nonetheless hopeful. This was not the case. This thread talked about SMB support levels. I was running my shares with support for SMB 2.1 through 3.0. I’ve since changed that to 3.0 only. No dice.

macOS

This guy on this thread thinks he’s nailed it. He may have, but not for me. I’ve included some of the text for reference below.

Server Performance Mode

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202528

The description reads:

Performance mode changes the system parameters of your Mac. These changes take better advantage of your hardware for demanding server applications. A Mac that needs to run high-performance services can turn on performance mode to dedicate additional system resources for server applications.

“Solution:

1 – First check to see if server performance mode is enabled on your machine using this Terminal command. You should see the command return serverperfmode=1 if it is enabled.

nvram boot-args

2 – If you do not see serverperfmode=1 returned, enter this following line of code to enable it. (I recommend rebooting your system afterwards)

sudo nvram boot-args="serverperfmode=1 $(nvram boot-args 2>/dev/null | cut -f 2-)"

I’ve also tried changing the power settings on the Mac mini, and disabled power nap. No luck there either. I’ve also tried using the FQDN of the NAS as opposed to the short name of the device when I map the drives. Nope, nothing.

 

Solution

My QNAP still supports Apple File Protocol, and it supports multiple protocols for the same share. So I turned on AFP and mapped the drives that way. I’m pleased to say that I haven’t had the shares disconnect since (and have thus had a much smoother Plex experience), but I’m sad to say that this is the only solution I have to offer for the moment. And if your storage device doesn’t support AFP? Sod knows. I haven’t tried doing it via NFS, but I’ve heard reports that NFS was its own special bin fire in recent versions of Catalina. It’s an underwhelming situation, and maybe one day I’ll happen across the solution. And I can share it here and we can all do a happy dance.

Random Short Take #31

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Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …

  • Late last year I wrote about Scale Computing’s big bet on a small form factor. Scale Computing recently announced that Jerry’s Foods is using the HE150 solution for in-store computing.
  • I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
  • Here’s are 7 contentious thoughts on data protection from Preston. I think there are some great ideas here and I recommend taking the time to read this article.
  • I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
  • There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
  • Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
  • Nexsan recently announced some enhancements to its “BEAST” storage platforms. You can read more on that here.
  • Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.

Random Short Take #28

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New year, same old format for news bites. This is #28 – the McKinnie Edition. I always thought Alfonzo looked a bit like that cop in The Deuce. Okay – it’s clear that some of these numbers are going to be hard to work with, but I’ll keep it going for a little while longer (the 30s are where you find a lot of the great players).

  • In what seems like pretty big news, Veeam has been acquired by Insight Partners. You can read the press release here, and Anton Gostev shares his views on it here.
  • This one looks like a bit of a science project, but I find myself oddly intrigued by it. You can read the official announcement here. Pre-orders are open now, and I’ll report back some time in March or April when / if the box turns up.
  • I loved this article from Chin-Fah on ransomware and NAS environments. I’m looking forward to catching up with Chin-Fah next week (along with all of the other delegates) at Storage Field Day 19. Tune in here if you want to see us on camera.
  • Speaking of ransomware, this article from Joey D’Antoni provided some great insights into the problem and what we can do about it.
  • A lot of my friends overseas are asking about the bush fires in Australia. There’s a lot in the media about it, and this article about the impact on infrastructure from Preston made for some thought-provoking reading.
  • I still use Plex heavily, and spend a lot of time moving things from optical discs to my NAS. This article covers a lot of the process I use too. I’ve started using tinyMediaManager as well – it’s pretty neat.
  • All the kids (and vendor executives) are talking about Kubernetes. It’s almost like we’re talking about public cloud or big data. Inspired in part by what he saw at Cloud Field Day 6, Keith weighs in on the subject here and I recommend you take the time to read (and understand) what he’s saying.
  • I enjoy reading Justin’s disclosure posts, even when he throws shade on my state (“Queensland is Australia’s Florida”). Not that he’s wrong, mind you.

Random Short Take #16

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 16 – please enjoy these semi-irregular updates.

  • Scale Computing has been doing a bit in the healthcare sector lately – you can read news about that here.
  • This was a nice roundup of the news from Apple’s recent WWDC from Six Colors. Hat tip to Stephen Foskett for the link. Speaking of WWDC news, you may have been wondering what happened to all of your purchased content with the imminent demise of iTunes on macOS. It’s still a little fuzzy, but this article attempts to shed some light on things. Spoiler: you should be okay (for the moment).
  • There’s a great post on the Dropbox Tech Blog from James Cowling discussing the mission versus the system.
  • The more things change, the more they remain the same. For years I had a Windows PC running Media Center and recording TV. I used IceTV as the XMLTV-based program guide provider. I then started to mess about with some HDHomeRun devices and the PC died and I went back to a traditional DVR arrangement. Plex now has DVR capabilities and it has been doing a reasonable job with guide data (and recording in general), but they’ve decided it’s all a bit too hard to curate guides and want users (at least in Australia) to use XMLTV-based guides instead. So I’m back to using IceTV with Plex. They’re offering a free trial at the moment for Plex users, and setup instructions are here. No, I don’t get paid if you click on the links.
  • Speaking of axe-throwing, the Cohesity team in Queensland is organising a social event for Friday 21st June from 2 – 4 pm at Maniax Axe Throwing in Newstead. You can get in contact with Casey if you’d like to register.
  • VeeamON Forum Australia is coming up soon. It will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Sydney on July 24th and should be a great event. You can find out more information and register for it here. The Vanguards are also planning something cool, so hopefully we’ll see you there.
  • Speaking of Veeam, Anthony Spiteri recently published his longest title in the Virtualization is Life! catalogue – Orchestration Of NSX By Terraform For Cloud Connect Replication With vCloud Director. It’s a great article, and worth checking out.
  • There’s a lot of talk and slideware devoted to digital transformation, and a lot of it is rubbish. But I found this article from Chin-Fah to be particularly insightful.

Random Short Take #7

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Here are a few links to some random things that I think might be useful, to someone. Maybe.

Random Short Take #6

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Welcome to the sixth edition of the Random Short Take. Here are a few links to a few things that I think might be useful, to someone.