Plex Local Cache

This is a project to help Plex servers which use remotely mounted storage. It attempts to manage a small local cache of videos which are likely to be watched next.

Use this at your own risk.

A few basic safeguards have been put in place to try to prevent data loss, but I cannot guarantee it. Please ensure the local-cache directory is empty and unused.

Installation

Clone the directory and run composer install to install the project dependencies.

Usage

This project assumes that there is a Plex library whose data is stored remotely and mounted using rclone or similar. Union-fs can then be used to mount multiple local and remote directories to a single merged directory.

Example:

LOCALMPOINT="/media/local"
CACHEPOINT="/media/local-cache"
REMOTEMPOINT="/media/plex"
UNIONMPOINT="/media/union"

unionfs-fuse -o cow $LOCALMPOINT=RW:$CACHEPOINT=RO:$REMOTEMPOINT=RO $UNIONMPOINT -o allow_other

Above, three directories are mounted to /media/union, the first one is read/write, the latter two are read-only. If multiple versions of the same file are found between the source directories, priority is given left to right.

Using this, we can write likely-accessed media to a higher-priority locally-cached directory to reduce buffering.

Once there is setup similar to above, this project can be initialised by running setup.php from the project route directory.

php setup.php

This will initialise the config.

Once the configuration has been created, test the app by running

php app.php

It runs in dry-run mode by default so no changes will be made. If you're happy with the changes, pass in -f as an option and the app will begin the process.

Requirements

PHP, PHP Curl, PHP XML

Limitations

Currently, this project assumes video files are in a single file. It also works exclusively for TV Series, and only on deck. It doesn't look-ahead on deck, so won't know to cache the next on-deck item.