I have been using Plex without issue with months now. Very quickly bought myself a Lifetime Plex Pass and have used the hell out of it. Loving me some Plex! Much better than my previous solution of mounting NFS/CIFS exports/shares over a VPN. Not that I ever thought that was a great idea but before Plex I had no other ideas.
A few days ago I noticed Plex was refusing to transcode. Direct Play worked flawlessly. A reboot of the server would fix the problem… until it happened again a few hours later. Could not figure it out and my Linux version had just gone out of support so I backed it all up and did a fresh install of both. I did a new install of the OS, a new install of Plex Media Server, did all my settings and libraries from scratch, and reimported the old viewing histroy. That was two days ago and everything was going great.
This morning I went to watch something. Will not transcode again. My Roku, for example, just sits at buffer 13% until it finally fails with a generic-- and not very helpful-- error message. I tried the web interface and it just sits loading forever with no CPU load on the server (although it does show a single process using that file via htop but it uses no CPU). I also just noticed, sporadically, whole libraries are refusing to load or take a very long time (1+ minutes) where before it was near instant. I tried another user I have setup and that user can not even load the libraries at all after just sitting there for a long time. Everything not cached by the client is either very, very slow or fails to load.
Something is very wrong. Just not sure what. Could it be an intermittent issue resulting from my import of the “old” server data? I was under the impression from the article I was only importing the viewing history… unless that was somehow what was causing my issue before the reinstall…
Plex Media Server: v1.10.1.4602
Ubuntu: 16.04.3 (64-bit)
Roku Plex Channel: v5.0.7
Edit 2018.02.04
It is transcoding again. It is loading libraries again. I did nothing. However if I try to mark anything as watched or unwatched within the web interface it works then very quickly switches back. I assume this is because it makes the UI change on the client before the server sends back a response resulting in the quick change.
Edit 2018.02.05
Now some items transcode without fail and some do not. My go-to-background-noise show is not playing at all no matter what video I try so I am panicking now. Other shows I have tried work flawlessly and the menus load very quickly (even when not pre-cached by the client). I tried removing the show from the setup folder, forced a rescan (where it disappeared), emptied the trash, rebooted the server (not service), moved it back to the folder, and rescanned (where it reappeared), and I am still having the same issue with it.
Waiting for tomorrow when the Plex Media Server curses out my mother and changes my will to include the line “I never liked any of you.”
Edit 2018.02.06
Just found a video that buffers extremely fast, uses Direct Play (although all its sister videos transcode at the same settings), plays for ~1-5 seconds with no audio, then starts the whole process over and over again on loop (fast buffering, Direct Play, no audio). Restarting the Plex Media Server fixes the issue.
Edit 2018.02.06
When it works it works. For a video or two. Then, after two-three autoplays, it just starts buffing, gets stuck at 33%. Server drops to a single process (as opposed to multi-core’ing it for x264) for that video at 0% CPU usage. When I back out and resume the video at the point I left off at it works for two-three autoplays.
