I have been running CORE for awhile now. I just recently wanted to setup PLEX but after some reading here on the community forum; the PLEX plugin no longer works and it seems to be a huge pain to setup through shell and sometimes it doesn’t work for some people. Can I still setup PLEX on CORE? Where can I find detailed instructions? If it’s easier to setup on SCALE, why? It’s going to be a pain to migrate over to SCALE from CORE. Any way to make the migration easier? What should I do??
It may be easier to upgrade from Core to the upcoming Scale Fangtooth (25.04) release. Fangtooth is currently in Release Candidate state. Hoping full release in next month or so. Browse the documents for Scale Dragonfish and Electric Eel for current information on upgrading between Core and Scale. That will help you plan for the process.
Post back any questions you have and what your current Core setup has for details. Things such as if you are using GELI disk encryption, VMs, Jails, etc. The better your details, the better the advice given.
Forget Core plugins. They have basically been abandoned
You need to roll your own Jail - which will still work as Jails are not deprecated.
Or move to Scale
Plex on scale is:
- Easier to deploy
- Supports hardware transcode with an Intel or NVidia GPU
Why is it easier? Scale is Linux, with Docker apps, and an actively maintained app catalog; Core is FreeBSD, with self-managed apps in jails, and Plex upstream doesn’t support hardware transcode on FreeBSD any longer.
Core is good for pure NAS functions, though Scale is at parity and soon beyond, from Fangtooth on.
Scale is where you’d be to run apps and anything virtualized, as well as NAS functions. Fangtooth in April and Goldeye in October improve the virtualization functionality, and I expect NVMe NAS to get a big speed boost with Goldeye.
I use two apps: Plex and Foundry VTT. Moving to scale greatly simplified running both, and I like that I have hw transcode again.
My recommendation is: Update CORE to latest in March, do not install Plex; then come April 15 migrate the setup to Scale Fangtooth. Install Plex, making sure to keep its metadata in a dedicated dataset, host mounted. Ditto media of course.
And have an appliance that “just works” for Plex, rather than manually administering jails.
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