So I’ve yet another recording “stuck” in the .grab folder. This one is also a truncated short recording of “The Bachelorette” (for my wife, so it is **extra bad **it did not record!).
Worse, the recording still shows as “in progress”…well past the conclusion time of the program. It will probably “stay” in recording mode all night…
Attached are the log files…I’m hopeful someone can figure this out…the virtual channel recorded is 2.1
BTW, other recordings scheduled for the night seemed to go well. Just ch 2.1 from 8pm-10pm EST did not record…and signal strength is excellent on that channel…
This happens to me at least a couple of times a week, mostly on longer recordings. I was suspicious that it was because I had the library set to Optimize so I have now turned that off and am waiting to see if the problem occurs again.
I have given up with DVR for now as keep having problems like this.
What I also saw is that for each show stuck like this there was a transcoder process that had been running since the recording started. 4 of these basically were slowing my server to a crawl.
Sometime in the night the recording moved out of the .grab folder, but unfortunately only 3 min 29 seconds of a two hour show recorded.
Of three other shows last night, two recorded correctly, and a third (Logan’s Run on the schedule above) only recorded a little over 10 minutes of a one hour show before failing. (Ironically, the “Logans Run” show that failed 10 minutes in stopped about exactly the same time I posted the log on this forum…). So I’m attaching the logs again for that differential, to see if that helps at all. If a developer sees this post, please let the user community know a root cause for this…and hopefully a way to mitigate it.
This machine I’m using as a Plex server has 16GB of RAM and an 8 physical core E5-Xeon processor, so it should have no problem eating up multiple streams…again, I’m hopeful one of the programmers will examine the log for a root cause to this issue…
The tuners used are two HDHomeRun Connect HDHR4-2US models with firmware updated to 20170707beta2.
Yeah I am super bummed about the reliability of the DVR in recent releases. I’m experiencing the same issue’s with “stuck” shows. I know Plex DVR is still beta but you’d think it would be getting more stable with each release but instead stability is moving backward. I was on the fence about a lifetime subscription but I think when my yearly plex pass expires I’m going to jump ship to Tivo Romeo OTA with lifetime program guide. I am starting to become of the opinion there is nothing like purpose built hardware for reliability and passing the wife test for brain dead reliability.
I can confirm this. I rolled back to 1.6.1 after using the 1.7.x builds for awhile now. Once I went back to 1.6.1 all my recording issues appear to have stopped.
Having the same problems. Going to have to try rolling back as well. Reliably recording is extremely important. These stuck ones, which seem to also keep a tuner allocated, cause lots of problems.
My theory (and it’s just a theory) is this… In the earlier version of Plex DVR, the recordings just took all the data coming from the tuner device and saved it all into a single file. When the recording was scheduled to be done, it stopped saving data to the file. In the 1.7.x versions, this was changed. Instead of one big file, the recordings are split into hundreds of tiny files and once the recording completes, Plex takes all these tiny files and converts them to a single file.
My theory is that if there is any kind of signal loss or file system issues, or a hard drive that isn’t fast enough to keep up and a couple of these tiny files get messed up in some way, Plex is often unable to put all the pieces together. (in an earlier post, I compared this to trying to put together a puzzle after your dog has chewed up a bunch of the pieces). So sometimes you’ll get what happened here…where it looks like the recording is stuck. In reality…Plex is trying and trying to put together the pieces but can’t. But it just keeps trying. There were a few times for me (and others in the forums) where this has also tied up the tuner and all subsequent recordings have been cancelled until a server restart gets Plex to quite trying to deal with the file.
DVR functionality convinced me to buy a Plex pass but now I’m stuck on 1.6.1 because I use the DVR quite often and the 1.7.x versions didn’t work for me at all. I keep checking the forums because I hope that this issue will get resolved, or that they’ll go back to the old way of handling DVR recordings. I don’t see staying at an older version to be a long term solution. At some point I imagine that certain aspects of Plex will stop working without updates (guide data, metadata that is pulled from outside sources, etc.)
Agent_Cooper, good analysis, it would be great to get confirmation. I will put out a new post, because if what you determined is true, they should have a two track solution…the ability to disable the live view for the old system of encoding one massive file with no live view, and the experimental feature of live view…and let the user toggle it on/off. Maybe the elusive Plex developers will see our cries for help…
With this new version of 1.8x, everything seems to be working for me, though this is just day 1…that never happened with 1.7x. Thank you (so far) Plex developers!
I do have transcoding off on the HDHomerun tuners…I think I’m going to try to see what happens with it back on…
