How long should a tv show recording take to move from .grab temporary file to it's final destination

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I recorded a tv show last night, but it is still stuck in the .grab file this evening. Is this normal? How long should this process take? Is there something I should be doing to get this file moved?

2

My recordings are normally in my library done with post processing to remove commercials and convert to mp4 within 3-11 minutes after recording ends based on whether SD or HD and 30 or 60 minute show.

If you have a recording still in the grab folder from last night it is hung and not recoverable. A restart of Plex Media Server is probably required. If left this way you might have more recordings that get hung in grab folder. After restarting PMS it will more than likely either delete the recording or it will be moved to library with only a few seconds or a couple of minutes of recorded content.

3

Since the upgrade to 1.7.x of PMS the transcode engine was changed. Now it does a remux of every recording. Many people have found this happens occasionally during that remux step. Some have speculates it is due to reception or video problems causing the remux step to just garble the video. Sometimes they will complete eventually, but safest course of action is to just restart PMS and sacrifice the problem recording. If it happens frequently you may want to revert back to 1.6.1. Without post processing it should be moved in less then 3 min to make the show fully available. One thing to keep in mind is that depending on how much you are recording at one time that could fluctuate a little bit.

4

You don’t have to sacrifice your recording by restarting
To keep the recording you need to end the one transcode process that is stuck.
In linux i fix by opening a command line ssh session then: Sudo ps -u plex
This shows me processes plex is running. I pick the transcode process with the longest running cpu time (since it got stuck after a few min) and kill it with the kill command. You may kill a remote users transcode process accidentally as you can’t tell which is which. If so they can just restart their stream
Sudo kill -KILL “process id number”
This usually gets it but sometimes it is a different transcode process and i have to kill some more. Once you kill the right transcode, either the post-processing will begin if you have it setup or the recording will move and finish if you do not have post-processing