Fix Plex Media Server Transcoder Crashing Raspberry Pi •

Plex Media Server on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 has been a roller coaster. Originally a chroot was required and discoveredy by Francis on his bitbucket guide. Then thanks to uglymagoo on the Plex forum it was very easy to install Plex using the Synology armv7 package. Now with the Plex ReadyNAS package transcoding is enabled by default and is the package uglymagoo's repository uses now. However the current version 0.9.16.6 has a bug with the transcoder. In order to fix the Plex transcoder we can replace it with a previous working transcoder from version 0.9.14.6. This is based on zenmod's mini guide from the Plex forums. This guide assumes you already have installed Plex Media Server on the Raspberry Pi 2 (guide) or 3 (guide).

This tutorial is relevant as of May 25, 2016.

Pi Unit	Processor	RAM	RAM Bus	Network	WiFi	USB	SATA	Cost
Raspberry Pi 3	1.2 GHz ARMv8 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	Yes	4	No	$35
Raspberry Pi 2	900 MHz ARMv7 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$35.00
Raspberry Pi	700 MHz ARMv6 Single Core	512 MB SDRAM	400 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$25
Banana Pi	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	No	2	Yes	$36.99
Banana Pi Pro	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	Yes	2	Yes	$45.00

Fix Plex Media Server Transcoder Crashing Raspberry Pi

We need to grab an old Plex package 0.9.14.6 where the transcoder worked and overwrite the broken transcoder in Plex 0.9.16.4.

cd /tmp
wget http://bit.ly/1pPEQFB -O old.tar
mkdir old

Extract the Synology 0.9.14.6 package

tar -xOf old.tar package.tgz | tar -xzf - -C old/

Copy the old transcoder into the Plex folder to overwrite the current transcoder

sudo cp old/Resources/Plex\ New\ Transcoder /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/
chown -R plex /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/

Restart the Plex Media Server service

sudo service plexmediaserver restart

Now you can try streaming the same video that was giving you trouble and the Raspberry Pi will attempt to transcode it. Because this Plex package is not officially supported there is of course no guarantee that all of your videos will successfully transcode.