I've been getting very frustrated at not being able to watch most of my video content with Plex. In theory, Plex Media Server should be able to stream my stored videos when I'm on the move directly to my iPad or mobile. But in practice it rarely seems to work. I spent an hour or so to do poring over the server logs and it was obvious that it simply wasn't transcoding anything. I don't know where Plex stores temporary files by default, but I'd set it to a location on my SSD disk, and there was simple nothing in there.
Eventually I tracked down the problem to a file-permission issue - the server didn't have write permission to the directory. So all it took was a quick application of chown and everything was solved:
colin@redick ~ $> sudo chown plex:plex mytmpdir
I have to admit I'm still puzzled as to why it stopped working as it certainly used to. I'm guessing that it some point I accidentally changed the temporary directory from its default value in the web-configuration interface.
