I am a HUGE fan of Plex. Plex is a server you run combined with both a great HTML5 web app and some awesome native clients. Plex has clients for iOS, Windows Store, Windows Phone, and on and on. Best yet, the Plex Server can run not only on your spare computers, but also NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices like Synology, Netgear, Drobo, and more.
Last year, Plex came to the Synology DiskStation. I have a Synology 1511+ NAS and run everything on it from Minecraft Servers to Plex to using it as a giant 5TB NAS to storing my Time Machine backups and Windows 8 File History. I also run CrashPlan headless on my Synology.
Synology has an ersatz App Store that allows you to easily install all sorts of stuff to your Synology NAS, like phpBB, Plex, Git, and more.
However, I personally (and others) have found this feed of packages to be either updated not very often, or when it is updated, versions don"t line up.
If I can be slightly critical of Plex for a moment, they are fairly aggressive about keeping their client and server protocol versions in line. This means if you aren"t keeping your Plex Server reasonably up to date, one day you"ll startup your iPad Plex app or Windows Plex app and be told that server version is too old. It"s a little jarring.
The issue for me happens when I go to the Synology to update and there"s no new update. So the client is saying "you need version x+2" and all I see on the Synology feed is version x.
Here"s the gotcha, and why I"m writing this up for you. You can use the Manual Install option (as seen in the top picture) then visit https://plex.tv/downloads and manually upload the .SPK file for Plex to your Synology server.
If you don"t uninstall Plex first - that"s the one that you install from Synology"s feed originally - then you can get yourself into some very weird versioning situations where Plex thinks one version is running and the Synology thinks another as seen in the screenshot below.
This has been discussed in the forums for almost a year now with no clear answer or solution.
Again, here"s what I did:
- Uninstall Plex from the Synology Package Manager
- Download Plex from https://plex.tv/downloads
- Use Manual Install to install the new SPK to Synology
I hope this helps someone. Be sure to check out Plex, it"s a joy.
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