Category: Plex Media Server

Plex desktop and HTPC client

slaanesh 3 Comments

Plex Desktop and HTPC clients are available again. Now Plex ships a precompiled QT 6 libraries with the private API enabled that allows for an easy packaging. The packages are available for EL9+ and Fedora on the x86_64 architecture only.

Just install the one you need via DNF. For the desktop application:

# dnf -y install PlexDesktop

For the HTPC application:

# dnf -y install plexHTPC

The packages come with every possible system library in use and can be installed in parallel. They both suggest all the VA-API drivers available in the multimedia repository.

Keep in mind that both sport MPV as the main player, so you can still customize the player options as you see fit. For example to force NVIDIA’s hardware decoding in both applications:

$ cat .local/share/plex/mpv.conf
hwdec=nvdec

The HTPC optional package that creates an auto starting “HTPC session” for set top box media players is not restored yet, I will add it in the next days.

The packages bundle QT 6 (for the web interface engine) with the private API enabled, FFMPeg with a progress API status reporting, a custom MPV and a CEC library in the HTPC client.

Why not using the official Flatpak installation directly? First of all I don’t like all the mounting and folder redirection of Flatpak, but also:

# flatpak install tv.plex.PlexDesktop tv.plex.PlexHTPC
Looking for matches…
Required runtime for tv.plex.PlexHTPC/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

tv.plex.PlexHTPC permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.PowerManagement, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver

tv.plex.PlexDesktop permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver


        ID                                                 Branch            Op       Remote        Download
 1.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08             i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 2.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08-extra       i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 3.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-555-58-02       1.4               i        flathub       < 305.0 MB
 4.     org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale                    23.08             i        flathub       < 360.2 MB (partial)
 5.     org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                  2.2.0             i        flathub       < 944.3 kB
 6.     org.freedesktop.Platform                           23.08             i        flathub       < 227.5 MB
 7.     tv.plex.PlexHTPC                                   stable            i        flathub       < 150.9 MB
 8.     tv.plex.PlexDesktop                                stable            i        flathub       < 149.2 MB

Proceed with these changes to the system installation? [Y/n]:

That’s a whopping 1.5 GiB compressed download compared to the package footprint:

$ ls -1hs Plex*
106M PlexDesktop-1.96.0.177-3.fc40.x86_64.rpm
105M PlexHTPC-1.64.0.170-2.fc40.x86_64.rpm

That’s more than 7 times the size. Flatpak applications with duplicate libraries everywhere are not really my taste.

Sonarr, Lidarr, Radarr, Tautulli and Spotifyd packages for Fedora

slaanesh 9 Comments

I now have a new Plex server with lots of storage in a new small cube form factor, so it was now time to automate things a bit more and put the box to proper use.

Now in the multimedia repository you can now find Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Tautulli. This allows you to populate and maintain automatically your TV Shows, Movies and Music libraries without effort. Tautulli is not particularly useful if you are not hosting Plex for third parties, but gives you anyway statistics and information in a nice GUI for consumption and also notifies you any time one of the other tools adds something to a library.

Now I can see how many times my kid has watched the Super Wings! TV show (a ridiculous amount of times, if you are interested):

The packages are built from the upstream releases. Being Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr built on different Mono versions and requiring a different minimum version, I assembled the packages from their Mono binaries tarballs. The plan is to make all of these available also for CentOS, so packaging needs to be relaxed. Tautulli as well bundles a lot of specific Python dependencies.

All of them come with proper System units and Firewalld rule definitions. So should be a breeze to enable them on the system.

$ rpm -ql sonarr radarr lidarr tautulli | grep -E 'systemd|firewalld'
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/sonarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/sonarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/radarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/radarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/lidarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/lidarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/tautulli.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/tautulli.service

Along with those, there is also Spotifyd, which allows you to turn any system into a Spotify client and/or Spotify Connect speaker. Without any configuration file it just works like a WiFi speaker support Spotify Connect, with a configuration file that contains a Spotify Premium username and password you have a fully connected client that you can control with the Spotify phone app like any other client.

If the Plex server is always on and close to a set of speakers, why not use it also as a WiFi speaker? Would also be nice to have Google Cast support; so my family could also use it for listenting to Plex hosted music, but unfortunately Google locked out all APIs for casting and no open source implementation exists (as far as I know).

For example:

This list comes from my phone, and I’m in the same network of the laptop. Everything else is signed in with my account or has been playing something when I was close by, so it’s still logged in.

Also Spotifyd will eventually be available for CentOS/RHEL even if it does not have any Rust packages. The version currently in the repositories is built to also support PulseAudio as a backend, as the plan is to run this on a fully fledged Fedora/CentOS/RHEL system. The binary release offered on the Github project is built with only Alsa as a backend as it requires a considerable less amount of libraries as dependencies; making it suitable for running on a barebone Raspberry Pi.

Plex Media Player is back!

slaanesh 1 Comment

Just a small post to notify that Plex Media Player package is back. Now it does not require Conan or Python anymore for building, and you can just build it using standard tools, the dependency issues between the Plex binary packages have been resolved.

Also the TV interface is now improved, on par with what Plex currently offers for other platforms, and it’s much better in terms of performance. I also don’t get anymore the weird positioning of the PIN window.

You can still install plex-media-player-session and do the minimal configuration required (extracted from /usr/share/doc/plex-media-player/README.Fedora):

If you are planning to do an HTPC installation, and would like to have Plex Media Player starting instead of the login screen the moment you boot the
device, execute the following commands as root:

# dnf install plex-media-player-session
# systemctl set-default plex-media-player
# echo "allowed_users = anybody" >> /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

The first command installs the required files (services, targets and PolicyKit overrides). The second command instructs the system to load by default the Plex Media Player target; that is X and the player just after. The third command allows the system to start the X server as the Plex Media Player user, otherwise only users logged in through a console or root can start it.

If you want to go back to your normal installation (let’s say Gnome), then revert back the changes:

# systemctl set-default graphical
# sed -i -e '/allowed_users = anybody/d' /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
# rpm -e plex-media-player-session

The package is available for all supported Fedora releases.

Also, on a side note, HandBrake has been updated again to track the master branch, as it now uses FFMpeg 4 and no longer libAV 12. This could probably lead to other improvements, like NVENC/CUDA support, more formats, etc.

Plex Media Player and MPV with CUDA

slaanesh 8 Comments

The Plex Media Player is now part of the multimedia repository for Fedora 25+. I works as a standalone player and also as the main interface for an HTPC setup, where the “TV interface” starts as the main thing when you power up your system.

Plex Media Player uses MPV in the background, so any compilation option that was added to MPV, is now also part of Plex Media Player by using the same libraries that were already available in the multimedia repository.

If you are using Gnome Software, you will also find it in the software selection screens.

To install it on Fedora, just perform the following commands:

dnf -y install plex-media-player

You will then find it along with the other applications in your menu.

Normal desktop interface

To get to the normal desktop interface just look for the Plex Media Player icon in your menu. You will be greeted with the familiar Plex web interface, with the main difference being that the player is local through the MPV library.

Enabling Plex Media Player startup at boot

If you are planning to do an HTPC installation, and would like to have Plex Media Player starting instead of the login screen the moment you boot the device, execute the following commands as root:

dnf install plex-media-player-session
systemctl set-default plex-media-player
echo "allowed_users = anybody" >> /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

The first command installs the required files (services, targets and PolicyKit overrides). The second command instructs the system to load by default the Plex Media Player target; that is X immediately followed by the player itself. The third command allows the system to start the X server as the Plex Media Player user, otherwise only users logged in through a console or root can start it.

You will be greeted with the TV interface just after boot:

If you want to go back to your normal installation (let’s say Gnome), then revert back the changes (again type the following commands as root):

systemctl set-default graphical
sed -i -e '/allowed_users = anybody/d' /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
rpm -e plex-media-player-session

MPV with CUDA

This has been already available for a long time, but with FFmpeg 3.3, CUDA dynamic support loading is enabled also in MPV, so the hard dependency on the CUDA library is gone, and the binaries load the library dynamically:

$ strings /usr/bin/mpv | grep libcuda
libcuda.so.1
$ strings /usr/lib64/libmpv.so.1.25.0 | grep libcuda
libcuda.so.1

So assuming you have the Nvidia driver already installed with the appropriate CUDA part, you can then play a video with the following command line:

mpv --hwdec=cuda /path/to/video.file

And then check with nvidia-smi or with the Nvidia control panel if the video engine is being utilized:

If you want to enable that by default, just make sure your configuration file has something like this inside:

$ cat ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf 
#hwdec=vdpau
#vo=vdpau
hwdec=cuda

Plex Media Server on Fedora 24 weird SELinux issue

slaanesh 10 Comments

Recently I upgraded my Plex Media Server from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24, and upon restart my Plex Media Server service was not starting.

After digging around a bit, I discovered that with SELinux in enforcing mode the service would not start (exiting with code “127”).

The only error I could find was a message saying that the Plex Media Server binary was not able to load some required library when SELinux was enabled. Funny thing is, that there is no AVC denial error in the audit logs. Also, reloading the Plex Media Server bundled SELinux policy or relabeling the filesystem did not help.

After fiddling around a bit, I discovered that I had to move the LD_LIBRARY_PATH declaration from the Environment to the ExecStart line, otherwise with the system in SELinux Enforcing mode the line is basically ignored and the server does not start:

--- plexmediaserver.service.orig	2016-06-19 21:47:57.793407813 +0200
+++ plexmediaserver.service	2016-06-19 21:48:16.984683363 +0200
@@ -7,11 +7,10 @@
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_HOME=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_MAX_PLUGIN_PROCS=6
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TMPDIR=/tmp
-Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver
 Environment=LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
 Environment=LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/test -d "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}" || /bin/mkdir -p "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}"'
-ExecStart=/bin/sh -c '/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Server'
+ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Server'
 Type=simple
 User=plex
 Group=plex

I don’t even know how to report this bug, does anyone have an idea about it and why does this happen? Is it related to some sort of SELinux boolean?