Fix Plex Media Server Transcoder Crashing Raspberry Pi

raspberry_pi_plexPlex 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.