[punk-coder]

Nice article.

I had big plans for using a Raspberry Pi as a Plex Media Server once. The set up was easy, I attached my external HDD and let it scan the libraries. My wife and I watched a few movies, it worked perfectly. The next evening when we sat down to watch a movie I saw that Plex couldn't connect to the media server. I went upstairs and attached a monitor to my Raspberry Pi and I saw that Wireless Internet was not working on it. I tried everything and eventually rebooted it and everything worked again. This turned into a daily thing. I followed all sorts of instructions I found on the internet to try and fix the issue, but to no avail. Every day there would come a certain time where the Raspberry Pi would just lose it's Wifi capabilities and a reboot was needed. Sad, because I liked the idea of this small box sitting on the corner of my desk running a media server. This was an older Raspberry Pi, maybe things have improved.

[karatestomp]

Yeah, you’re gonna want Ethernet for a server. Both ends of a connection being on wifi is asking for flakiness even if there aren’t any problems with the server’s hardware or software.

[xenorplxx]

Running any server on wifi, even home plex instance, is not a great idea. It's a shame that rPi doesn't support PoE out of the box, that'd mean you could've only 1 cable connected, but it'd manage both network and power.

[Jonnax]

Really? It's not 2005. Sure something system critical use ethernet.

But the idea that it's WiFi that's unreliable is clearly not the case.

Something is wrong with the RPI WiFi chip, driver or OS configuration.

[sliken]

Normal homes these days have quite a bit of competition for wifi. Hell even today's watches these days have wifi. Add a kindle, a few security cameras, a few laptops/tablets, a few phones, etc. Then add some crappy/noisy LED bulbs, a cheap microwave, and various consumer electronics and wifi is far from a sure thing for streaming 4k video over... especially for hours at a time.

I had some network lag/dropped frames, turns out my stereo receiver was downloading a quite large firmware update. Had me freaked out a bit, I hadn't recorded the mac address. Didn't figure it out till I turned the TV on and saw a dialog asking if it should upgrade.

So, yes, generally I'd recommend that anything that's going to consume hours of 4k video be put on ethernet if at all possible.

[newqer]

I always try to connect devices that don't move to Ethernet. It saves WiFi bandwidth for "mobile"devices and is extremely stable and the full bandwidth is always available.

Things like SmartTV, RPi, Solar Panels, Amplifier, etc. I hate it that Chromecast only has a wireless option.

But more on-topic, it shouldn't drop off WiFi just like that.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> SmartTV

From what I've seen about Smart TV's, I'm better off not allowing them to ever connect to the Internet. Forgo all the "smart" features and just use a Fire TV stick, Roku, Chromecast, etc.

My current TV is an 8 year old 46-inch "dumb" TV, but I plan on upgrading to something bigger later this year, and it looks like my only options will have Smart features, but I already use a Fire TV stick and a RPi, so I don't think I need the smart features.

[kingosticks]

Roku devices also track you, you are not much (at all?) better off.

https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/10/watching-you-watch/

[Sohcahtoa82]

I'm not really that concerned with tracking, but I am concerned with ads.

[Legogris]

Projectors are a compelling alternative - most of them aren't "smart" (yet).

[JshWright]

> I hate it that Chromecast only has a wireless option.

They're a little pricier, but the Chromecast "Ultra" supports ethernet out of the box. For the base model, you can get an adapter.

[sgt]

It's 2020 now and my experience is that WiFi is wonderful, yet still too unreliable to count on 100%. At some point you're gonna run into issues if you run something that's meant to be 24/7. What's so hard about cabling?

[throwaway8941]

If you're living in an apartment (like a sizeable chunk of the world's population does), WiFi is absolutely not an option for anything even remotely traffic heavy.

[pnutjam]

2.4 is unusable in my house. I can only reliably use 5.0 ghz

[alexfromapex]

It’s so easy to use PoE that it’s almost out of the box

[darkteflon]

Fwiw, I run an rpi4 4gb as a plex home server over ethernet and it’s been flawless for the two months I’ve had it. I set it up on a lark expecting it to be basically rubbish but turns out that, at least with my media and an LG TV Plex client, it’s never had to transcode a thing. It’s now my only media server. It just sits there in the corner, costs about $5 / month in electricity, faithfully serving up anything I throw at it.

On top of that, it also runs my Pihole and a bunch of other services through Docker.

Bit of a revelation, really.

[Legogris]

As a free software alternative to Plex, Jellyfin is definitely worth considering. FSF fork of Emby, integrates well with other software like Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett etc.

https://jellyfin.org/

[mattl]

FSF forked Emby?

[blowski]

I had a similar problem with an early model of Raspberry Pi, but no problems with the newer one. Definitely worth giving it another go.

[Zenbit_UX]

I heard plex server is no longer supported on the Pi's though.

[twmiller]

It’s running on my pi4 down in the basement, no issues.

[jumbopapa]

Why not just setup a cron job to run a reboot command daily?

[op00to]

Why not have it just work without having to reboot?

The real answer is that the instability that manifests overnight will eventually manifest while you’re watching a movie.

[Fiahil]

Why not set up a local kubernetes server and let it handle the reboot ?