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Deploying Plex Google Drive
Because PLEX will terminate all of Plex cloud I decided to install Plex self hosted Plex with Google drive.
I tried several times with several servers. They suffer the same problem. It's a freakingly slow.
I am using plexdrive from GitHub.
Here is what I do.
1. Install Plex Drive
2. Install Plexmedia server
3. Mount my Google Drive into /mnt/Plexdrive
4. Setup Plex media server
I don't know what I did wrong. The drive successfully mounted. I can see my file. But it's very slow. Scanning took forever. Not to mention streaming.
Is it a spec problem ? I don't really need transcoding. I am thinking it's more like network problem.
I can see my file on the mounted folder. But I can't interact with it (e.g. CP, mv, cat, etc). Because it's very slow. Any idea what should I do ?
Comments
First, I would suggest dropping Plex Drive and using Rclone with a cache mount. Unfortunately Plex Drive development has ceased (receiving maybe a commit a year now) and is going to start becoming obsolete as time progresses.
With that said assuming you decide to use RClone Cache, depending on your content, I use a direct non-cached VFS read mount for Plex Seeding (what I refer to the initial metadata pass and analyzing). Depending on your library size, this could very well take days (at 30+TB it took around 3-4 days for all media). Afterwards, switch to using a cache and you'll be good to go.
Use PlexGuide.
Honestly I wouldn't suggest using google drive for plex. The speeds are slow, and meh from my experience.
But their plexcloud is great and very fast. As long as I am not transcoding that is. Is there anyway to make use of my Google Drive Movie collection ?
I don't really like the Idea of download 2TB of movie into a server. Especially Server in Asia with that kind of storage is so fucking Expensive.
rclone
I personally use the install Script from https://cloudbox.works/ or in theyr github at https://github.com/Cloudbox/Cloudbox
I'm surprised this works at all. Using rclone, google does the most throttling and slowest speeds out of the three providers I use.
i tried rclone cache, nothing works. They all sufferd the same shit. Very slow. Only vanilla Plex works out.
Is there any way I can use my Movie on My Goole Drive ?
Or should I abandoned PLEX, and create a streaming website that play things from google drive ? is there a script to fetch all file name and link from google drive ?
Have you tried playing the files directly from Google Drive? That should rule out any network bottlenecks between you and Google's PoP.
Yes, it works fine. No buffering or other problem. That's why plex cloud is great. It plays the file from google drive directly. Why can't plex make their subscriber easier by allowing self hosted plex to fetch files from google drive like PLEX CLOUD.
I mean, if they are discontinuing the plex cloud. At least release its feature into self hosted plex. Terrabytes of HDD is not cheap, unless using google drive that is.
Well, PlexDrive does exactly that. Scanning a large library will take a long time. Its even documented under PlexDrive issues in GitHub. But once the scanning is done, it should work. Have you tried direct play from Plex?
rclone won't work properly and you may even get a ban from google drive. Have a look at this: https://github.com/madslundt/cloud-media-scripts. It uses a mix of plexdrive and rclone and works just fine. I had up to 5 parallel 1080p streams (bitrate >10 Mbps) and never had an issue.
What's your server Spec ?
I always direct play (no transcoding needed). When I am using plexdrive. I understand it took a long time for scanning. I finished the scanning just fine. But after I finished scanning , it plays the movie terribly slow. That's it , if it even play at all.
Try tweaking the Plex settings. You could give Emby a try too but then it might use more resources than Plex. What is the CPU utilization when Plex is streaming? Sometimes Plex transcodes for rendering subtitles even though you are direct playing.
I am aware of it. It's direct playing. I play it using Plex media player on my PC. And it says original 720p (0.8Mbps). There is just no way a transcoding 720p movie only use less than 1 Mbps bandwidth. 720p movie will result at least 4Mbps or something like that.
Here is the thing, I added 2 folder as my library. 1 is ordinary folder the other is Mapped Google Drive Folder. The ordinary folder can play the movie just fine. Which mean, PLEX, my server, and my internet connection is just fine. But the movie on Google Drive is very slow, which means, for some reason my OS can't fetch fast enough the file from the Google Drive.
Well, you can have a 2Mbps 720p stream. But, I think the bottleneck is somewhere else. Try streaming a file stored locally on disk on your server.
Tried it. Works fine.
Yeah need to figure out which one causing the bottleneck.
@yokowasis: Since you have your own server for Plex you could take a look at these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/5ni728/plex_with_nginx_better_performance_and_everything/
https://quickbox.io/knowledgebase/set-up-a-cdn-for-plex-with-cloudflare-nginx/
Your server might just have bad routes to google or it might be getting throttled somewhere. Too many points of failure in this setup (for my liking at least). Nothing beats local but if you're gonna go remote, limiting how far you have to go will always make things faster.
Try vpn with another provider, so routes changes
Okay. I somehow managed to get it working using rclone cache with a few caveat.
Is Plex pegging the CPU while scanning? Normally, scanning should work in the background during playback too if automatic scanning is on (not recommended; see below) unless your server is severely underpowered.
Plex should just do incremental scans subsequently. I would, however, turn off automatic scanning and just use the CLI to manually scan after adding new stuff.
This could be a connection problem between your server and Google's PoP. Any error messages from the crash?
He has told me it has 1gb of memory. Depending of settings can be the oomkiller
I'm doing this for the lols.
1/ Library scanning is excruciatingly slow.
2/ Playing while scanning is basically a no go (takes too long, don't even know if it's working or not)
But more importantly:
3/ It doesn't seem to be worth it. I have a decent sized library (about 5.5 TB) on a $20 Hetzner server. Everything performs miles better without reading from the mount. I can see this being OK to push seldom used content to drive (because unlimited storage for $10 is a very good deal) while keeping the popular stuff on the local drives. So it's a good complement to local storage but I don't think I'd ever use this setup as my main Plex infrastructure.
EDIT: I will add, however, that it seems that library scanning is better when you have better hardware (probably not a surprise). When scanning using an OVH/similar VPS performance is quite bad but it "feels" faster on the aforementioned i7 Hetzner dedi (plus, Hetzner has some pretty good sub 10ms peering to Google and a dedicated gigabit port which I'm sure is helping).
I give up using Plex in Google drive. Kodi have native support with Google drive with an add-ons. No need for a work around. I am migrating to Kodi.
Weird that so many of you have had issues using GDrive as the backend for Plex. Been using solely GDrive on a Hetzner auction dedi for months now with up to 9 simultaneous streams with no problems. The difference between local media and remote media is near enough unnoticeable. Scans have always been quick as well, with automatic scans enabled. I know that @MasonR has a similar setup too without any issues.
I really wish Plex would release the plug-in they used on Plex cloud, instead of letting their user doing a work around and shenanigans.