Can Plex run on a Raspberry Pi?

Technically, yes, but practically no. The reason this is a bad idea is that the Raspberry Pi is underpowered for transcoding video. Videos (especially HD movies or TV shows) will not stream well from a PLEX server running on a Raspberry Pi - you have been warned.

We’re going to use Plex as our media server, but there are others such as Jellyfin and Emby. Instructions below are adapted from PiMyLifeUp.

Install PLEX

First follow these instructions to add the Plex respositories to the apt package manager lists. This allows us to use apt-get install to download the Plex media server binaries and apt-get update to upgrade them down the line:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -

echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Official documentation for the above steps can be found here

Now you can install plexmediaserver via apt-get

sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver

Once plexmediaserver installs you should be able to access the web UI at: http://pi1.local:32400/web/ (replace “pi1.local” with the IP address of the Raspberry Pi on your network)

Plex config file locations

PLEX default config: /etc/default/plexmediaserver

Remember, if you make any changes to the config file you’ll need to restart the plex media server using the following command:

sudo systemctl restart plexmediaserver

Troubleshooting the PLEX installation

If you get the following message during install…

Configuration file '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list'
 ==> File on system created by you or by a script.
 ==> File also in package provided by package maintainer.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:

I would suggest selecting Y to use the package maintainers version of the Plex config file; however, if this is not your first install of Plex and you’ve made configuration file changes before, you may want to choose N to keep your version of the config.

Plex can’t see files

The plexmediaserver process runs under the unix username plex. If your Plex installation can’t see your files, make sure the plex user has read/write access to the folder where your media is stored. In my case I wanted to point Plex to my Samba NAS share, so in order to allow PLEX access I just need to add that user to my nas_users groups

sudo usermod -a -G nas_users plex

If the PLEX web UI prompts you to sign in

Reload the URL and the popup will go away. Once you have access to the PLEX web UI go to settings and point PLEX to your media.