I wiped my main media disk and am now in the process of restoring the media folder. Plex is intermittently running at ~1400% cpu as it rebuilds the thumbnails. Not totally sure why it is rebuilding them since they should already be in the library, but my server is set to update when new files are detected so that's triggering the library scan when files are reloaded from backup.
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Advice: 2018 Mac Mini for Plex Server?
- Thread starter Jedwardoo
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I wiped my main media disk and am now in the process of restoring the media folder. Plex is intermittently running at ~1400% cpu as it rebuilds the thumbnails. Not totally sure why it is rebuilding them since they should already be in the library, but my server is set to update when new files are detected so that's triggering the library scan when files are reloaded from backup.
Im not really familiar with how a Plex "library" works, but this just sounds ridiculous. The niggly issues I have with iTunes are nothing compared to this madness.
When you purchase a movie in iTunes it is added to your library along with the appropriate movie poster. A media server is presented with a disk full of movie files and it has to figure out what the movie is and then find the appropriate poster. At the simplest level it can simply match the movie name with a existing movie name in the server's on-line database. When indexing something like a home move (which uses a different media scanner) the movie has to be loaded, fast forwarded a bit and then do a frame capture. This requires processing. It happens only once, during the initial library creation. Normally you don't even notice this background process.
I meant more in terms of - how it handles metadata. When you said "restoring the media folder" I assumed you meant you still had the original files, but copied to a different disk. Why would the metadata for each file not be embedded within the file?
Not sure I understand your question. The video file has the intrinsic data needed for it to play (bitrate, aspect, video & audio encoding, etc.). The poster is not included in the file, nor are thumbnails needed for home videos. The poster becomes part of the media server metadata (poster, rating, notes, tags, etc.) which is associated with the movie file. The media server data is lost when you delete the library or if you move the movie files to a different disk with a different file path.
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Any reasonably recent content is almost certainly going to be in a mp4 or mkv container, for both of which there are multiple open source libraries to manipulate the metadata.
Well, if they didn't do this:
This wouldn't happen:
It's literally the same concept as having track info in music files, which has been the standard for 2 decades.
Yes, but that is not the point of Plex. The point is that it should be able to handle practically anything out there, and not every container would be able to have the metadata Plex requires, and some media doesn't even come in a container anyway. Also, having to write metadata to fit every single container is a ridiculous idea, hence why metadata is kept in a central folder far away from the files themselves.
Yes, and that metadata is horribly limited and not up for anything modern, and thus completely useless, unless you ONLY work with modern audio formats. Really dude, you are talking about stuff you clearly have no graps of.
That doesn't preclude what I said at all. If you give it an ancient .avi file, fine, store the metadata in some ancillary file. But modern container formats, that are likely 80 - 90% of what people use now, can handle that information internally.
So, rather than chewing up 1400% CPU because your library (which, let me guess, is in `~/Library` by default?) got lost and it needs to re-find all the custom info (and hey if you had custom info entered for say some home movies, well **** you, enter it again I guess?), good software would store the metadata with the file whenever possible.
Well, like I said, 2 container formats give you probably 80-90% of uses where you'd be able to store it with the media anyway.
What are you even trying to say here?
MP3 has been around since the mid 90s and supports ID3 tags.
Indeed, I have no graps of anything.
~/Library/Plex Media Server
I guess the point that you are making is that in iTunes you can add all of that data to the track and so the tracks can be moved to other locations without losing that data. But is that really true? If you look at your Music/iTunes directory you will see an Album Artwork directory. I'm not sure when iTunes needs to put the artwork in it's own metadata vs the track file itself, but clearly are times that it cannot.
Someone give that man a prize.
Aha! So it turns out that if an mp3 has ID3 tags pre-ID3v2, they can't store artwork. You can of course upgrade the ID3 tags to a newer version, but I'm guessing iTunes doesn't do this by default so to not cause "why don't all my mp3s work on <insert archaic MP3 player>".
The artwork in `Album Artwork/Download` is what iTunes has downloaded from Apple (if you have the Fetch Artwork option turned on). The other folders are caches of the embedded artwork from the tracks themselves. I'm not sure why iTunes doesn't embed the artwork directly into the tracks when it downloads it, because it certainly has the capability to (and can be scripted to embed the 'linked' artwork). Even in the scenario where you use iTunes to get iTunes Store art, and don't embed it somehow, and just kept your iTunes library folder - you'd have all that artwork.
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I am installing Plex server on a new Mac Mini (i7-8700) for purposes of testing and possibly replacement of my existing server IF it supports GPU transcoding properly now.
I have been waiting for it to index everything and build the thumbnails. I've not seen anything greater than 6% CPU usage for the main Plex app and ~10% for the Plex IMDB plug-in. The media itself is stored on an 8 bay Synology NAS on a 10GbE network (both the Mini and the Synology are connected via 10GbE).
Just wanted to mention because of your high CPU utilization issues. I should mention that I'm simply eyeballing the CPU utilization via Activity Monitor. In total my mini is about 90% + idle during this process.
~550 movies
~120 TV seasons
(just the stuff I can't stream on iTunes or Vudu, basically)
Edit: Ok when it hit the TV seasons it launched some additional processes and is using about 25% of my CPU resources. Of course I'm fine with this b/c idle CPU cycles aren't helping me.. and it's the initial scan and setup.
I also noticed that there is a server setting to run the media folder scans at low priority.
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For what it's worth I tested this today and it now works fine, so cool that the support was added.
I will note that when transcoding Starwars (1977) 4K HEVC version there was a huge CPU spike for a minute or so at the beginning of playback for some reason. The fans on my Mini went crazy before everything eventually settled down. The server indicated that HW decoding was taking place the whole time so I'm not sure what caused the spike.
Normal 1080p transcoding is a piece of cake when using HW, but HEVC still manages to hit the CPU moderately with HW engaged. Of course with software transcoding the CPU gets hit hard regardless.
I'm just using the i7-8700's integrated GPU.
Note: The Star Wars 4k77 HEVC encode is a worst case scenario. It's about 150Mb/s with a good bit of film grain.
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I should never have mentioned it. That was during some spikes while doing a rebuild. Normally I don't see much Plex cpu usage at all.
Peoples media libraries didn't jump into existence at the beginning of 2019, nor did their files magically convert into modern formats.
No, it is in Application Support as it should be. These guys actually know what they are doing with the server, which is also why Plex is so popular.
And while it is weird it is reindexing, there's likely a reason for it. Also, it is a one-time thing, so why you find it so crazy is quite beyond me - Together with the above answer, I can only assume you are actively trying to find flaws in Plex, based extremely limited understanding of what it is and does.
See the first answer.
Also, you've now polluted the media file with stuff which is only relevant for one single persons media software. That's such a big no-no for anyone working with media.
Yes, which is nowhere near what is needed for Plex. ID3v1 is 128 bytes of metadata. Good luck using that for storing anything our of the few bytes of metadata that it is actually made for.
MP3 has been a thing since the mid 90's and has supported ID3 tags with artwork since the late 90s.
MP4 and MKV have both been a thing since around 2002.
Until the folder in ~/Library is no longer there (i.e. new/different computer, different user account, fresh OS install..)
Artwork and Track information is only relevant for one persons media software? Really?
If I open up a media file (let's say a TV Show episode) I've added to iTunes, in say, VLC - it recognises the tags, and the artwork. Because they're in standardised metadata fields.
ID3v2 is already 20+ years old, and supports up to 256MB of metadata.
I can't even begin to imagine what you think Plex does with track information and artwork to somehow think that the mechanism every other media player uses, is not workable.
With all of your answers I can only assume you are actively trying to defend a piece of software you personally use because someone on the Internet questioned why it did weird ****.
As I said, ID3v1 tags are *not* possible for what Plex does, because they are limited to 128 bytes!
And you still believe every single media on the planet jumped into these containers by themselves?
You really don't get the point or difference when you ask this.
Yes, but there are NO standard metadata fields for every single possible idea in the history of media files.
Congratulations, so what? It still doesn't change my point.
Actually, it is the exact other way around. You can't grasp that it is possible to use some media in some ways, and other media in other ways, so you automatically assume that there has to be support for every single purpose in all media types in existence.
You can go through the metadata a random media file from Plex below, and then somehow tell yourself that all of this is supposed to be useable for all media files on the planet, and therefore should magically be included in all media files for no reason, because they will never be used (You could for instance go with your weird idea that MP3 files need all of this):
<art/>
<banners/>
<chapters/>
<collections/>
<countries/>
<directors/>
<genres/>
<originally_available_at>
<posters/>
<producers/>
<reviews/>
<roles/>
<similar/>
<tags/>
<themes/>
<title>
<writers/>
<year>
<rating/>
<title_sort/>
<art/>
<writers/>
<chapters/>
<themes/>
<quotes/>
<year/>
<duration/>
<genres/>
<title/>
<tagline/>
<content_rating_age/>
<rating_count/>
<collections/>
<trivia/>
<tags/>
<audience_rating_image/>
<rating_image/>
<producers/>
<audience_rating/>
<studio/>
<posters/>
<originally_available_at/>
<roles/>
<countries/>
<content_rating/>
<original_title/>
<summary/>
<reviews/>
<directors/>
<banners/>
<similar/>
Oh I use Plex, and have done so for 8 years, so I know very well how it works. But contrary to your, again, imaginary ramblings for reasons i can not fathom, don't speak very positive about Plex. In fact, I'm one of the hardest critiques on this forum of what they are doing, which you can check for yourself by going through my posting history. But oh I am quite sure that won't matter to you, because, facts, you know.
I believe the majority of the majority of people's media is likely to be in one of those formats, yes. Fallbacks are fine for legacy formats. Using a worse fallback because you can't be bothered to work with the native capabilities of technology is idiotic. Not all screens are Hi-DPI so maybe Apple, Microsoft etc should just give up on Hi-DPI display modes, because not all displays hav them? Tell people to just set the resolution lower so things are big enough to read?
Cool story bro, I was referring to ID3v2 tags.
But you can't explain it? If you have a movie, the information about that movie - the title, the cover art/poster/whatever image you use, the actors in it, the director - that stuff is intrinsically the same information, regardless of what software you're using. Using iTunes rather than Plex doesn't suddenly mean a movie was directed by someone different.
For the ones most people will care about - they're standardised (per format at least) by the use of predefined tag names. But both MKV and MP4 support custom tag names for anything specific that Plex somehow needs to do... which you still haven't really identified?
Huh? Show me where I said am MP3 file needs anything? I said they SUPPORT storing tagged metadata about the content of the file, so that it can be read and used (and even copied into an internal, optimised representation) by a media library, so that opening the same file with a different app, or with the same app but a different (due to whatever reason) library, has the relevant information about said file.
What you've said or done is irrelevant, just as what I ate for lunch is irrelevant. How Plex handles this metadata is absurd in my opinion, as evidenced by posts on the Plex support forums where the software not only won't write metadata fields, it doesn't even read them properly. But keep using what works for you. Maybe the next Mac Pro will let Plex get to 3000% CPU so it can re-catalogue all the entries again.
I'm gonna stat off with saying I only read the first 3 or 4 replies of this thread - I just wanted to add my input to the OP's original question.
a 2018 Mini would be overkill for plex IMO. And probably perfect for your need of streaming 1080p across 5 devices.
I use a 2009 2.0Ghz C2D Mac Mini for plex. I mainly watch video on it locally as it's plugged into my livingroom TV; but occasionally I do stream via plex to my bedroom TV, at 1080. It works flawlessly unless it has to transcode something, in which case the old C2D doesn't do too well. Though the majority of what is on there doesn't need any transcoding, and just streams fine. I've never tried two streams at once, including myself my household is only two people so I wouldn't ever need to. I imagine the C2D wouldn't more than one very well - however even an i3 (the quad i3 in the 2018 mini is more like a 4 year old i5) should be able to do it no problem.
a 2018 Mini would be overkill for plex IMO. And probably perfect for your need of streaming 1080p across 5 devices.
I use a 2009 2.0Ghz C2D Mac Mini for plex. I mainly watch video on it locally as it's plugged into my livingroom TV; but occasionally I do stream via plex to my bedroom TV, at 1080. It works flawlessly unless it has to transcode something, in which case the old C2D doesn't do too well. Though the majority of what is on there doesn't need any transcoding, and just streams fine. I've never tried two streams at once, including myself my household is only two people so I wouldn't ever need to. I imagine the C2D wouldn't more than one very well - however even an i3 (the quad i3 in the 2018 mini is more like a 4 year old i5) should be able to do it no problem.
1400% cpu is irrelevant without a time scale.
Bursts are fine, and indicate a multithreaded application making good use of the cores. Extended CPU hammering means that there is a resource issue and/or a runaway process.
Bursts are fine, and indicate a multithreaded application making good use of the cores. Extended CPU hammering means that there is a resource issue and/or a runaway process.
If using an Apple TV (I use the 4th Gen) and you experience some buffering, try switching from wired to wireless network connection. Im not sure why but it made a huge difference in time to start/scrub videos and resolved the buffering I was experiencing. (Mac mini 2018 i5 for server connected wired)