Setting up a Raspberry PI Plex Media Server

Vivek Kundapur -

Have you ever wished that you has a personal video jukebox at which is always available and running without burning a big hole in your pocket?

Well, setting up something like this very simple. All you need is

  1. A Raspberry PI
  2. An empty memory card with minimum 8 GB capacity
  3. Portable Hard Drive
  4. Ethernet cable to connect to your router

Installing the Raspbian OS

Flash the Raspbian OS on to the memory card. The steps for downloading and installing Raspbian are detailed out in the Raspberry PI web site. The steps are details out in this link.

Once the installation is done, insert the memory card into the Raspberry PI and boot into the OS.

Setting up the Plex Repository

Let's start with updating Raspbian with the latest libraries.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then add the Plex repository keys with the following command
wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

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

Get new updates
sudo apt-get update

Install the Plex Media Server application
sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver

Setup the permissions for Plex Media Server by setting the user. By default, Raspbian has the pi username which I am assuming that you have also used to login. Add the user by opening the Plex configuration file with this command
sudo nano /etc/default/plexmediaserver.prev

Set the user as shown below
PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USER=pi

Now we are all set!

Restart the Raspberry PI.

Adding video, photos or any content to Plex server

If you are already a plex user, this should be pretty straight forward for you. Fire up the browser and enter the following URL
http://<IP Address>:32400/web/index.html
Replace IP address with the IP address of the Raspberry PI.

Add your favorite movies, videos, photos or music to the library.