Media server setup

Watch parties stream from a machine you control, not from us. That means your library never leaves your hardware, and it means there is a pairing step. The admin console walks you through it in six steps; this page is the same walk with the reasoning attached.

Before you start

You need:

• A machine that stays on — a desktop, a NAS or a small server. It does the encoding.
• Plex running on it, with the library you want to watch.
• Docker, if you would rather run the companion in a container. Optional.

The walk

Open /menu → More → Admin → Media → Set up. The console's own description of it is "The six-step walk: download, pair, point at Plex, verify", and that is exactly what happens:

1. Download the host companion onto the machine with your library.
2. Pair it. The console shows a short code. It is deliberately short-lived — if you take too long, ask for a new one rather than reusing it.
3. Point it at Plex. Give it the Plex address and token. Both stay on your machine.
4. Verify. The console asks the machine to answer. If it does not, nothing is saved — a half-linked host is worse than none.
5. Pick a channel for watch parties.
6. Turn Watch on for the server.

Live TV, and adding something new

Two things sit beside the watch parties on the Watch tab, and both come from the same paired machine.

Live TV is a channel guide. If you run Threadfin (or anything that serves an M3U and an EPG to Plex), its channels appear as a browsable guide inside Discord — filter by category, page through it, and start a room on a channel the same way you would start one on a film. Presence is measured from the stream exactly as it is for a film, so live viewing earns and counts like everything else.

⚠ Live TV is optional even once the media server is paired. A server with no Threadfin simply does not see the guide; nothing breaks and no button is left dead.

Add New searches your library from inside Discord and queues what it finds, so nobody has to alt-tab to Plex to line up the next thing.

Checking it later

Media → Host answers two separate questions: whether a machine is linked, and whether it is answering right now. Those are not the same thing, and the console keeps them apart on purpose — a linked host that stopped answering is the failure you actually want to see.

Turning it off

Media → Unlink withdraws the machine's access, and it stops within seconds. Use it if the machine changes hands or you suspect the pairing leaked. Media → Watch just turns watch parties off for the server without touching the pairing.

Troubleshooting

The code expired. Ask for a new one. They are short-lived by design.

Paired, but not answering. Check the machine is awake and the companion is running. The host readout distinguishes "never linked" from "linked and silent" — the second means the pairing is fine and the process is not.

Plex works locally but not for the bot. The companion needs to reach Plex from where it is running. If Plex is in a container, localhost is not the same address.

Playback starts and drops. Almost always upstream bandwidth on the host. Encoding is on your machine; so is the ceiling.