Starting a new thread since it’s been a while since 1.8.x.
Regrettably, after a few hours of testing 1.9.0 started exhibiting the same behavior as all previous versions since 1.6.1 the last and apparently only stable DVR release.
I have reinstalled and tested every version back to 1.6.1.
If anyone in Plex Dev wants, I have the following for each point release saved at the time Plex was exhibiting the errors
copy of grab directory
copy of caches directory
copy of logs directory
copy of plex media server directory
so to be clear I have tested and replicated this for the following versions of plex. All versions exhibit recording issues, stuck tuners, encoding issues and crashing issues:
1.7.0
1.7.1
1.7.2
1.7.3
1.7.4
1.8.1
1.8.3
1.8.4
1.9.0
There ought to be some data and info in my archives that the dev guys could use to finally track this down and fix it.
1.6.1 is rock solid and runs for weeks at a time with no issues.
I am sorry but giving a list of issues does not help get them investigated and addressed
It would be better to break up the list of issues into separate forum topics providing description of issue in each together with the related server logs.
Perhaps the list is a hint that there really are serious issues unresolved. Serious issues that have escaped the notice of the development team? Serious issues that have been downplayed by management? For a now-commercial product, and one that almost worked (1.6.1), what the heck happened? For gosh sakes, recordings that don’t finalize and the inability to find available tuners are not brush-off problems. Yes, we can live with the guide (for a while longer), but I (we) want to know that shows that are set to record actually do AND are watchable and not stuck in the grab folder. Put it back in beta and throw resources at it. And try to replicate the issues. That shouldn’t be hard.
@lmolter said:
Perhaps the list is a hint that there really are serious issues unresolved. Serious issues that have escaped the notice of the development team? Serious issues that have been downplayed by management? For a now-commercial product, and one that almost worked (1.6.1), what the heck happened? For gosh sakes, recordings that don’t finalize and the inability to find available tuners are not brush-off problems. Yes, we can live with the guide (for a while longer), but I (we) want to know that shows that are set to record actually do AND are watchable and not stuck in the grab folder. Put it back in beta and throw resources at it. And try to replicate the issues. That shouldn’t be hard.
Agreed - these are simple problems to duplicate. Numerous folks such as yourself have duplicated these problems over and over with each release. The problems may be difficult to solve - but the excuse just can’t be that the development team can’t replicate them. They are too obvious and too consistent.
The problem is this isn’t people “duplicating” problems, these are people “experiencing” the same problem.
Duplicating a problem, or replicating a problem would be seeing a problem report, and figuring out what series of events leads to that problem. If the Plex devs could replicate the problem, or someone could document a way to take a working system and make it a broken system with a particular issue (as listed) they would certainly be one step closer to fixing them.
Before you attack me, I am not claiming these issues don’t exist!
Just that without documenting the environment and providing logs and exact circumstances it is basically impossible to fix the problem. (Because you can’t see it, and they don’t have a way of replicating it to confirm their fix actually resolves it). These kinds of bug reports are only fixed by them fixing every bug they can replicate, and hoping that the issues as listed by OP are a weird edge-case version of the bug they just fixed.
Having said all of the above, it really does sound like you need a plex dev to get in touch and actually ask for the specific information. Is there a support email address or support site that you know of to get in touch with Plex Support that isn’t the DVR discussion forum? (I honestly don’t know, I’ve only just purchased my Plex Pass ~ 2 months ago to activate my own DVR which is thankfully working fine for me so far [Hauppage QuadHD])
@MeateaW - But we do attach logs. That makes it even more frustrating. But… I’m thinking about another thread I read. Maybe it isn’t the software (Plex) as much as it is the hardware? The development team can’t possibly replicate every environment. I, myself, have Plex on my NAS, whose initial purpose was to store files, not be a media server. Resultingly, it’s under-powered.
<devil’s advocate=ON>
Could it be that if I had a dedicated Plex server that my problems would vanish? Is it the SD tuners? Transcoding? I’m beginning to see that there are way too many variables here. Perhaps we’re blaming the messenger?
</>
After similar experiences with DVBLink (transcoding - not the failure to finalize), maybe it IS my hardware.
I know that a clean install of my one laptop has resolved some issues - like I think I initially installed 161 and I couldn’t get more then 4 recordings between 2 Prime’s. I’m not 100% sure but I think that’s the version about where I started using the DVR.
Until a few days ago I had been installing each new version as it came out - I will also say that 99% of my recordings finished with no issue and that I never saw that stuck in the grab folder issues. I did get a transcoder issue here or there but it was never outside of a tolerance that I found unacceptable.
So . . . these issues that you are putting forth aren’t hitting every person and that makes it that much more harder to track down. If you can do a clean install or your OS - I’d recommend that. It may not solve your issues but it may . . .
The only reason that I dropped back is so that I can record 9 shows at once . . . once that is fixed I will definitely be moving to the latest version as it seems 161 has issues on the latest Amazon Fire version (I haven’t dug into the issue but it I keep seeing some stuttering and pausing on the latest Plex on Amazon). Luckily I don’t use that TV that much to watch so I’m trying to avoid it for now.
My personal view is that some forum threads could just discuss and list issues for long time but, on the hand, targeted and forum threads with a specific issue / failure raised with the relevant logs with debug logging enabled tend to produce results - whereas talking about problems may not and will rely on internal teams hitting the issues and getting those looked into - not all user seen issues are encountered in-house
The issues noted in my thread(s) are known issues among users, and all related to the same singular topic, the new method of writing and encoding video when the transitioned to LIVE TV capability in DVR.
I post all of them together and with point releases and with exhaustive testing of all versions so that NO ONE has to go though the, at this point hundreds of hours of testing, troubleshooting, google searching and forum thread scouring to figure out what was going on.
If you are experiencing:
hung tuners
incomplete or never finishing recordings
choppy broken unplayable recordings
aborted recordings (for no reason)
complete recordings which never write a file to the file system
etc
Then you can learn from my posts that 1.6.1 is free of all of these issues. If you use ANY version between 1.6.1 and 1.9.0 you can expect to experience all or most of these issues depending on your particular set up.
We hear what you are saying sa2000, but I am also trying to clearly establish for users and developers alike that:
exhaustive testing has been performed
the problems are repeatable and reproducible by many
I have copies of all directories, logs, partial recordings and every other file that PLEX generates at the time the problems arise.
Everything they need to begin to solve the problem is here in my post and can be found in many other people’s posts as well.
Hopefully frustrated DVR users can find my posts and quickly find the solution, reverting to 1.6.1 or not using DVR. AND hopefully if PLEX dev needs sample files, logs etc they will see my posts and know that I have what is probably approaching a terabyte of archived data, logs and directories for every point release to help them solve the issue.
I think the misunderstanding is coming from the idea that people are just bringing up these items out of the blue. When in fact many of us have been posting these problems, and providing logs, for all of these issues for months now. The fact that people say we shouldn’t just list the issues on a post seems to indicate that Plex isn’t reading these forums to ascertain any of the issues people are experiencing from prior posts.
Now for the most part I know this isn’t true. Take for example where the Plex DVR doesn’t seem to use more than one HDHomeRun box on versions greater than 1.6.1. Many of us are experiencing this problem and in this case Plex has acknowledged the issue and said they replicated it. Hopefully we should see a resolution soon. However, it did take quite a while to get to the acknowledgment part.
It’s just that initial responses from Plex members doesn’t help the perception that this forum is nothing but a black hole for any of the issues people are experiencing. Since this is really the only way to get support you can start to see how frustrated people get when they’re doing the right things only to be viewed as obstructionists.
@chargerdan said:
I think the misunderstanding is coming from the idea that people are just bringing up these items out of the blue. When in fact many of us have been posting these problems, and providing logs, for all of these issues for months now. The fact that people say we shouldn’t just list the issues on a post seems to indicate that Plex isn’t reading these forums to ascertain any of the issues people are experiencing from prior posts.
Now for the most part I know this isn’t true. Take for example where the Plex DVR doesn’t seem to use more than one HDHomeRun box on versions greater than 1.6.1. Many of us are experiencing this problem and in this case Plex has acknowledged the issue and said they replicated it. Hopefully we should see a resolution soon. However, it did take quite a while to get to the acknowledgment part.
It’s just that initial responses from Plex members doesn’t help the perception that this forum is nothing but a black hole for any of the issues people are experiencing. Since this is really the only way to get support you can start to see how frustrated people get when they’re doing the right things only to be viewed as obstructionists.
I have just been through all your topics (one) and posts and cannot find anything current that has logs and is yet to be investigated. You have mentioned here the problem that has been acknowledged and is being fixed.
You had some old posts regarding unexpected deletion of recordings after successful recording. These as far as I know are due to how keep for xx days is handled. The has been clarified on the support article here https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/226074728-Setting-Up-Recordings -
Keep Episodes from Past X Days is actually based on first aired date. An issue has been raised to get this looked into - in the meantime the documentation was updated to clarify how it is used.
Forum posts may get missed and if that happens, I would advise they are bumped. But bumping posts that just list issues without providing logs does not help
Your response to my post is exactly the problem I, and I would guess others, have with how Plex uses this forum.
Believe it or not, I was trying to defend the manner in which Plex uses this forum. But instead of acknowledging this you choose to look at my history for an old post that I had fixed myself by creating a dummy entry so I could change the delete parameters that Plex was using. But I certainly didn’t get that answer from Plex.
Now I admit that I’m not the first to post a problem or provide logs. I tend to try to fix things myself and then read posts from others for ideas when things don’t work. That’s just my style. Only when I’m at the end of my rope do I start to post. However, I do notice that people don’t get a response unless they start hitting the boards hard.
The main idea I was trying to get across is that people do post problems they have then take to making a general post with all of the issues combined into one all encompassing plea for help.
Now in terms of the “current” problem I’m having you can look at the topic below:
And as you can see from the August 25th post from johnm_ColaSC. Between this topic and others he had gotten indication from Plex that they have replicated the issue. So at this point why should I pile on with my own logs if Plex has enough to work with? To me that just seems like creating more noise and doesn’t help solve the problem.
However, prior to rolling back to 1.6.1 I did experience many of the problems people are posting about (recordings not ending, tuners show being used when not, “there was a transcoder error” messages, forever scrolling wheel on LiveTV…).
At this point I’m just frustrated and I’m going to stick with what works. I’m a lifetime Plex Pass member so you have my money. I signed up for the organization of my library and the DVR and that works with 1.6.1. But as Plex moves father away from that version I notice issues using things like the mobile apps so we’ll see how long this strategy lasts.
I was just trying to convey what I saw as a problem.
As someone stated above I would strongly suggest you do a reload of your OS environment if possible. My windows PMS was experiencing several of what you consider reproduceable widespread bugs. After reloading windows the problem was resolved. My PMS had been instralled for years so who knows what was left from years of upgrade and other activities on the WHS install. I don’t believe that it will fix everyone, but has a good chance to.
sa2000 you want something with logs that hasn’t been looked at in 1.9.0. I have a perputal hang problem where plex hangs and my post got no replies! Forums are ok but stuff gets lost! Where is the ticket system to make sure things don’t get lost!
I can concur the problems are back with 1.9.0 series. I currently show 7 things recording however only 2 things are in my .grab folder and my post processing script hasn’t been engaged since 10pm last night.
This really looks bad on plex. This is a core functionality now in the program and basic parts are not working and are unreliable. You really must do more QA checking of the product you pushing to your customers. Its unacceptable.
In the screen shot you see that there are 2 recordings that succeed, Time Scanners. Then there are 5 straight recordings that do not ever complete.
When I look at the details of the recordings that have not completed they show something like 578% complete and they never actually complete. They will stay in that state until I either kill the transcoding sessoins, kill plex, or restart the computer. If I kill the transcode sessoins ther is a flurry of activity and then the shows show up correctly (metadata applied and show up in the correct folder (TV, Movies, etc.)) but the recording is only a few minutes long and never the full show.
If I kill Plex or reboot the shows do not show up at all.
I have three HDHR (Extend, Connect, Dual) devices with two tuners each.
I do NOT have a post processing script.
I am running the latest 1.9.0 build that is available to me.
I do know that @DaveBinM had been working on this issue with some Plex Devs, though he himself is not a Plex employee. You may want to reach out to him to see what else he has found and look at the other logs he has collected from other issues on the forums.
Please let me know what other information you need from me.
1.9.1 exhibits ALL of the same issues as all versions from 1.7.0 to the current 1.9.1
hung tuners
incomplete recordings
alerts for failed recordings for no reason
etc
Backed up and archived all directories for the folks at Plex should they need them. Downgraded back to 1.6.1.
I had 9 simultaneous hung recordings spanning 5 hours. None of them ever completed and at the tail end of that window, none of them were activating any tuners even though the Plex interface says it is recording.
For DVR users, 1.6.1 is still the last stable release.
Looking forward to testing the next point release.
i don’t know if I am just lucky or not but I have not been experiencing those. I have been running Plex for over a year now (always staying current). I have 1 HDHR Prime and a dedicated laptop (Lenovo T420, 8GB RAM, Win7) with an external 1TB HD and it all seems to work ‘well’. Occasionally (maybe once a month) there is a show whose recording is missed (I expect this to go to 0 at one point) but other than that, LiveTV works well (I watch via FireStick and iOS), playback of recorded stuff works well. I do transcode offline though. So for example a show is recorded (TS) on D:\Plex, then MCEBuddy picks it up, moves it to G:\Plex and transcodes to H264 MKV. I do this overnight (all the day’s recordings are processed between 1am and 8am). With this setup, things seem to work smoothly. Just providing my setup and experience here.
