2019 Apr 5th - Plex Server keeps crashing

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#:1.15.3.858
Player Version#: 3.83.1

Logs - https://www.dropbox.com/s/tk0m3mm2idi9507/Plex%20Media%20Server%20Logs_2019-04-05_20-03-18.zip?dl=0

i’ve been having issues for a week or so with the server cutting out and requiring a restart. Tonights been exceptional cutting out on family movie night three times at the climax of the movie. One very disappointed wife and kids.

If anyone can assist please. I’ve turned on debugging ( not verbose) and DB link is to the zip file. System is running on an I7 laptop, on SSD with 16 GB RAM, very happily for a coupel of years, win10 1809.

2

Well for anyone interested, i’ve been bug checking and reading the log files for errors for the last few days.

Ive found out that one of my webcams a Hik camera is advertising UNPnP on the network, and turned that ov, turned off DNLA on the server also, but I think the main culprit, is that it was trying to use hardware encoding for transcodes which was mucking it up. We’ll see. Main reason it uses a Nvidea card, and this server is on a old laptop!
Time will tell

3

Thanks for the logs

Are you running Plex Media Server headless ? or as scheduled task?

The crash is in mfx_mft_h264ve_32.dll and these crashes have been seen before but only when running Plex Media Server headless / through RDP or as service and with hardware acceleration enabled

With Transcoder Hardware Acceleration there is a problem when the server does not have a desktop eg running through RDP or as service / scheduled task

4

Hi, thanks for interacting. Its not headless , etc, Plex just starts within the startup folder and has a desktop. Its on widoes 10 on a HP laptop, without a graphics card. Ive turned off hardware acceleration, I think thats the smoking gun, will report back if thats not the root cause.

S

5

All I can tell you is that the crash was in the Intel driver mfx_mft_h264ve_32.dll whilst Plex Media Server was testing it out to establish if it is available to be used

Apr 05, 2019 19:58:33.444 [8172] DEBUG - Codecs: testing h264_mf (encoder)
Apr 05, 2019 19:58:33.705 [8172] INFO - [FFMPEG] - MFT name: 'Intel® Quick Sync Video H.264 Encoder MFT'

and it crashed at this point

You could check installed version to see if there is an update available from Intel

Last time we had crashes in this dll were when PMS was run as service/RDP - so i thought it might be the same

7

Checking back, no crashes reported since unticking, hardware acceleration. It may have been calling the dll and causing the crash maybe. WHatever, the result is that I have stability once again, phew, just in time for GOT. :slight_smile:

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@elsdons We are expecting these Intel h264_qsv encoder crashes to have been fixed by the ffmpeg update which has been released in Plex Media Server beta 1.17.0.1709-982421575

If not, please raise a new forum topic with server logs after a crash