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  • Author Author: biglesp
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 10274 views
  • Likes 4 likes
  • Comments 40 comments
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Raspberry Pi 2 - Plex Media Server

biglesp

With our ever increasing media libraries containing movies, TV shows, music and pictures we need something that can serve this content to any of our devices.

 

25100202219_0e81f79d0e_b_d.jpg

 

If you fancy opera in the kitchen, jazz in the bathroom and the latest Hollywood blockbuster in your pocket, then you need a media server and the Raspberry Pi 2 is the ideal low cost candidate.

To replicate this project you will need:

 

  • A Raspberry Pi 2
  • A laptop running Windows/Mac or Linux
  • A minimum of 8GB SD card
  • A 2A power supply
  • An Ethernet cable connected to a router.
  • An external USB hard drive

 

16249575259_467b219fb4_k_d.jpg

 

We start the project by installing the latest version of Raspbian on to an 8GB or greater SD card. The best tutorial on how to do this is provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and can be found on their blog

With Raspbian installed we now need to boot our Raspberry Pi. Insert the microSD into the Raspberry Pi, then attach any peripherals such as keyboard, mouse, HDMI, Ethernet to the Pi. Lastly attach the power cable to boot the Pi.

When your Pi has booted to the desktop, click on the menu to the top left of the screen and go to the Preferences menu. From there select the Raspberry Pi Configuration application.

In this application we need to change the boot behaviour so that the Pi boots to the terminal and is logged in. We’ll also change the memory for the GPU to only use 16MB of RAM, and overclock the Pi 2 to 1GHz.

With these changes made, save and exit the application. You will be asked to reboot, do so before progressing.

With our Pi rebooted we now find ourselves at the terminal. It may seem a little scary at first but the terminal is the best way to work with a Linux computer.

Setup software

Our next goal is to install the software necessary for our Pi.

First we update our list of available software. In the terminal type.

 

sudo apt-get update

 

The update will take a few moments to complete. When the terminal is returned to you enter the next command to install the HTTPS transport package to enable access to HTTPS content over the Internet.

 

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https -y --force-yes

 

Next we shall download a key that will authenticate our downloads to ensure they are safe

 

wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key  | sudo apt-key add -

 

With the key downloaded we now add a new repository to our list, this repository is provided by dev2day.de who has worked on the packages that will power our Plex install.

In the terminal type

 

echo "deb https://dev2day.de/pms/ jessie main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list

 

We now update our list again, to ensure that we now have the latest updates for the Plex Media Server.

 

sudo apt-get update

 

Lastly we install the Plex Media Server software.

 

 

sudo apt-get install -t jessie plexmediaserver -y

 

The install will only take a few minutes and once completed the Plex Media Server will automatically start as a background service on your Pi.

Fix IP address of the Pi

To ensure that we can discover our Pi on a network we will now fix the IP address of the Pi.

First we need to find out the IP address, in the terminal type.

 

 

hostname -I

 

Write down your IP address!

Now let's fix the IP address, in the terminal type

 

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

 

At the very end of the line we will add the IP address that we earlier wrote down. So type

 

ip=THE IP ADDRESS YOU WROTE DOWN

 

With the IP entered press CTRL + O, then Enter to save your changes.

Now press CTRL + X to close the file.

Now reboot your Pi to make the changes permanent.

 

sudo reboot

 

With your Pi rebooted we shall now test that we can access the Plex server. On your laptop or desktop PC open a web browser and type your IP address followed by :32400/web so for example I typed.

 

192.168.0.90:32400/web

 

24841031413_78331093d4_b_d.jpg

 

This will now open the Plex Media Server software and we will need to read and accept the Terms and Conditions before progressing.

Once Plex has loaded take a few moments to get familiar with the interface. Specifically the libraries, which will house your media collection.

The SD card of our Raspberry Pi is rather small, so let's add an external hard drive and store our media there.

Plug in your USB drive. Nothing will happen in Plex until we mount the drive. In Linux, mounting a drive means that it is ready to be used. On your Raspberry Pi, in the terminal type

 

dmesg

 

You will see a lot of text whizz up the screen but keep a look out for your hard drive.

So now lets create somewhere to link our hard drive to the Raspberry Pi this will be a directory called “library”. In the terminal type

 

sudo mkdir /mnt/library

 

Now we shall open a text editor and add a line of code to mount the drive on boot. For our drive we used a FAT32 formatted drive. As this is the only USB drive it will be given the assignment “sda” and if the drive has one partition, where our data is stored, then it will be “1”. This gives us the location of our media which is “sda1”.

 

sudo nano /etc/fstab

 

25467761615_c0b2d45027_b_d.jpg

 

So now we shall mount our drive, got to the last line which starts with a “/” and make a new line under it. Enter the following and try and keep your spacing similar to those above.

 

/dev/sda1    /mnt/library   vfat   defaults    0    0

 

To save your work press CTRL + O followed by Enter. Then to exit press CTRL + X.

Reboot your Raspberry Pi.

 

sudo reboot

 

Once the Pi has booted back up navigate to your content by typing.

 

cd /mnt/library

 

Now we need to see where our content is, so to find it type

 

ls

 

You should see lots of directories and files, just as you arranged them on your main computer.

Our next step involves enabling access to the files for any user. As our server will be in our home we shall enable access to all of the content for all of the users. Typically this is not the done thing for big servers in production but for our server this is fine. So to enable access we need to type

 

sudo chmod 777 -R /mnt/library

 

Now this might take some time so be patient.

 

25349753862_c979d92f73_h_d.jpg

 

So now that we our drive ready to serve our media, let's start using it!

Back to our laptop/PC and open your web browser to your Plex Media Server.

You will be prompted to add a library, so go ahead and do so. Now which library you add depends on what you have. I chose to add a couple of TV series. When ready click on “Add Library” to import the media.

 

24837201614_aacabb5271_b_d.jpg

24841031493_351b6b9f21_b_d.jpg

 

Depending on the amount of media that you have to import this process may take minutes or hours, so please be patient and wait for the process to finish.

When the media is imported, Plex will try its best to grab the metadata, the information about the content such as genre, IMDB data, actor details etc.

 

24841467453_b9cea3a480_h_d.jpg

Multi User Access

The huge benefit of Plex is that any user on the home network can access any of the media in the library. So children can watch their favourite films on the mobile device, parents can listen to music or podcasts or share their family photos on their laptops.

Plex can also be streamed to a chromecast device, enabling high definition movies to be enjoyed on the big screen.

Listen to all of your music across your entire home and all you need is a Raspberry Pi and a little Linux know how.

  • I wanted to use my new Pi2 as a "random picture display", but I didn't want to install the "media center"
    I was very frustrated with using python and the pygame "resources" (whatever they call it)
    Ultimately, I decided to try a different approach; html with javascript!

    Here's the html/javascript solution, which works perfectly!

    copy everything below!  and have fun!!

     

     

    // this is a "random picture display" javascript
    // you open it with your browser and the browser does all the work
    // well, aside from your having to put the image informtion in
    // I will the datadable on my windows machine, using a visual basic program that i wrote
    // hope this works for you as well as it does for me!

    // I'm running it on a Raspberyy Pi 2, with the standard installation (not the media install)
    // the display is set to portrait orientation on the Pi in the config file
    // by using sudo nano boot/config.txt
    // adding the line
    // display_rotate=3
    // which results in a clock wise 270 degree screen rotation

    // if you added instead
    // display_rotate=1
    // it would result in a clock wise90 degree screen rotation

     

    <form id="newwindow" name="newwindow">
    </form>
    <>
    <html>
    <head>

    <title>Awesome Images</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"  content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    </head>

    <body bgcolor="#000000" text="#000000">

    </body>

    <table width="100%" height="97%" border="0">

    <tr>

    <td>
    <p align="center" valign="center">
    <img name="SlideC">

    </td>
    </tr>

    </table>

     

     

    </html>

     

     

    <script language="JavaScript1.2" >

    var newimg;
    var wid;
    var hit;
    var currentdate = 0;
    var theranlink = " ";
    var core = 0;
    var created = 0;
    var imgstrt = 0;
    var imgstp = 0;
    var imgcnt = 0;
    var imgary = 0;
    var chk = 0;
    var hrat = 0;
    var wrat = 0;
    var intvl=15000;

    // maxwid is the width of your Pi's display in pixels
    // maxhit is the heigth of your Pi's display in pixels
    // this is set up for a monitor rotated to a Portrait orientation
    var maxwid=728;
    var maxhit=1266;
    // if you wanted a landscape orientation you would comment the two line above (use leading //)
    // and uncomment the two lines below
    //var maxwid=1266;
    //var maxhit=728;

     

    // picpath points to the "root directory" of your images
    // this way you can copy this file to your desktop once filled with the picture array
    var picpath="/media/pi/Transcend/pics/";

     

     

    g_iimg = 0;
    g_imax = 0;
    g_ImageTable = new Array();

    var time = new Date().getTime();

    function ChangeImage(fFwd)
    {
    g_iimg=Math.floor((Math.random()*g_imax));
    Update();
    }

    function Update()
    {
    mag=1;

    //centimg=picpath + g_ImageTable[g_iimg][0];

    centimg=g_ImageTable[g_iimg][0];
    newWindow2(centimg);
    }

    function Next()
    {
    mag=1;
    ChangeImage(true);
    }

    function main()
    {
    if(new Date().getTime() - time >= intvl){

    ChangeImage();
    }else{
          
    }
    }

     

     

    function newWindow2(newimg)
    {
    wid=g_ImageTable[g_iimg][1];
    hit=g_ImageTable[g_iimg][2];
    wwid=(wid);
    whit=(hit);
    wrat=wwid/maxwid;
    hrat=whit/maxhit;

    chk=0;
    if (hrat>1){
    chk=1}
    if (wrat>1){
    chk=1}

    irat=hrat/wrat;
    if (chk=1){
    if (hrat>wrat) {

    SlideC.src=newimg;
    SlideC.width=wwid/hrat;
    slideC.height=whit/hrat;

    } else {

    SlideC.src=newimg;
    SlideC.width=wwid/wrat;
    slideC.height=whit/wrat;

    }

    }
    }

    // ********************************************************** insert data table here ***********************************************************************************
    // the data table must follow this format, and the quotation marks must remain
    // g_ImageTable[g_imax++] = new Array ("imge name","image width in pixels","image heigth in pixels");
    // an example of the array where it is used directly iin the directoy is below
    // g_ImageTable[g_imax++] = new Array ("flower.jpg","768","1024");

    // if you have multiple directories under the root that you want it to access then the array is this format
    // g_ImageTable[g_imax++] = new Array ("directory name/image name","image width in pixels","image heigth in pixels");
    // an example of the array where it is used from a root directoy is below
    // g_ImageTable[g_imax++] = new Array ("garden_pictures/flower.jpg","768","1024");

     

     

     

    //******************************************** end of data table *************************************btw, it is unlimited in the number of images you can insert bove

     

     

     

     

    // dely makes a 0 to 20 second pause
    dely=Math.floor((Math.random()*20000));

    // the variable dely above is added to a "standard delay" of 20 seconds
    // this yields a variable refresh time of 20 to 40 seconds
    intvl=20000+dely;

     

    //do not add anything below this line
    setInterval(main, intvl);

    Next();

    mag=1;
    g_iimg=Math.floor((Math.random()*g_imax));

    </script>

  • Hi guys...

     

    I cant seem to find plex.js for being able to change it to becoming transcoding my subtitles, because when i try to run them, it's given an error that the "server is not powerful enough". I don't get it. Why does not someone do a fix for the recent version of plex. That's if someone could ever gott to work.

     

    Cheers!

  • in reply to Former Member

    Hans v. Werkhoven

    192.168.178.15:32400/web

    What is the /web at the end?

    Otherwise check your router if 32400 is allowed trough the firewall.

    Clem

  • Hi, I have configurate the rasbian and the Plex software button I can't open the website after the installation.

    I can ping the ip-adress  (192.168.178.15) but it die not  open the website 192.168.178.15:32400/web.

    Wat do I wrong?

    Sorry for my bad Englisch.