Accessing Trailers issue... fixed on aTV reboot

Dev Community Apps & Creations
1

I just installed PlexConnect (using OpenConnect) a few days ago, and immediately tested it without problems. Today was the first day I went to use it for real, and I had a bunch of problems.

 

I could access my server through the aTV (2nd gen, 6.2.1 OS), get a list of available categories from my Plex server, get a list of available shows, and available episodes, but I noticed artwork wasn't loading, and I couldn't play any episode. I checked to make sure PlexConnect was running (it was), and Plex Server was running (it was), so I rebooted PlexConnect (through OpenConnect). Still had the problem. I rebooted the Plex Server. Still had the problem. I pulled the plug on the aTV and everything was fixed on reboot.

 

A few hours later I had exactly the same problem, and this time I just pulled the aTV plug and when it booted up it was running fine.

 

Does anyone know why the aTV would be having issues, and whether there's a way to fix the problem? Looking at my troubleshooting, I can only assume that it's an aTV issue, and nothing with the Mac serving everything up, as rebooting it solves the problem.

 

Thanks for any help you can lend. I tried searching the forum and found others with the "Accessing Trailers" problem, but nothing that seemed to be the same as this issue I'm having.

2

It is a genric error message.

Please read the sticky on posting as it contains info on how to report an issue, we provide a template that helps us understand your setup and usually pins the problem down quickly.

That said it sounds like a network/subnet issue, i am going to put my money on you possible running a VPN or something like VMWare that creates virtual network interfaces that is confusing the auto detection for all the devices  ;)

3

aTV model: 2nd Generation running 6.2.1

DNS: 10.0.1.33

Local aTV IP: 10.0.1.46 (corrected IP address)

Device and OS: Mac Mini 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 (8GB of RAM) 10.7.5

PMS: 0.9.11.1678-c48ffd2

Local IP with PMS: 10.0.1.33

PlexConnect Version: 0.4-dev (used OpenConnect to set it up)

[PlexConnect]
enable_plexgdm = True
ip_pms = 192.168.178.10
port_pms = 32400
enable_dnsserver = True
port_dnsserver = 53
ip_dnsmaster = 10.0.1.1
prevent_atv_update = True
enable_plexconnect_autodetect = True
ip_plexconnect = 0.0.0.0
hosttointercept = www.icloud.com
port_webserver = 80
enable_webserver_ssl = True
port_ssl = 443
certfile = ./assets/certificates/trailers.pem
loglevel = High
logpath = .

The log file isn't helpful as it cleared when I stopped and started the service.

I don't have a VPN or VMWare running that I'm aware of. There's very little running on the machine; it's really just used as a media server. I have LogMeIn installed so I can connect to the computer remotely; that's the only network-related thing that I have running. I have an Airport Extreme that the Mac Mini is hooked into, with an Airport Express that acts as an extender. The AppleTV is connected through WiFi. I also used OpenConnect to install the Plex graphic replacing the app (I'm actually using the iMovie plugin).

4

We need the log really to see what is happening, just restart it and then just copy it to the clipboard and then to the desktop if necessary.

As you are using an extender and it is intermittent it may be that the ATV is sometimes connecting to your router and at other times through the extender, causing it to jump around on subnets (it has been a while since i have seen this particular setup).

Stop PlexConnect and change the following lines in settings.cfg (change the "True" values to "False", noting the use of a capital "F" and hard code in the appropriate IP addresses and port number).

enable_plexgdm = True
ip_pms = 192.168.178.10
port_pms = 32400
enable_plexconnect_autodetect = True
ip_plexconnect = 0.0.0.0
 

5

Hm... I have seen this a couple of weeks ago - once. aTV/PlexConnect was working fine, just all the images were missing. If I remember correctly, I also cycled power to aTV and everything was back to normal.

Not sure what to do about this.

6

Alright, I changed those values in the settings. I'll play around with the aTV and see if it's broken, then upload the log file. It was working fine last night.

Once I have it "broken" again, I could always change the Airport Express to deny the aTV from connecting (I'm using MAC address filtering).

Baa, that sounds like the issue. Images weren't loading, but the list of contents were coming through. The native Apple things (like movies) didn't load anything at all. I'm willing to try to work through the problem if you have any ideas on what to do.

7

Okay, I made those changes and it works for now. I'll report back if there are any issues. I also checked, and right now the aTV is connected to the Airport Extreme, not the Airport Express.

8

Alright, great news (somewhat), the aTV got borked again.

19:31:21 DNSServer: DNS request received!
19:31:21 DNSServer: Source: ('10.0.1.46', 64257)
19:31:21 DNSServer: Domain: local
19:31:21 DNSServer: ***forward request
19:31:23 DNSServer: -> DNS response from higher level

That's the last bit of "normal" operation I had while browsing the aTV. I went into Plex (iMovie Theater) and it loaded my sections. I clicked on "TV Shows" and it stopped working. I tried to go into Movies (to load from Apple) and didn't get anything. Tried music and that didn't work. I was able to browse the contents of my other shared computers without a problem (didn't try playing any media). Went into Trailers and I could browse the trailers, but couldn't play anything, and images weren're loading. Tried going into Crackle and it was the same thing; browse, can't play, imagine missing.

You can see at 19:50 I tried going back into iMovie Theater, and PlexConnect is trying to process stuff, but nothing is showing up on the aTV.

What I find odd is this line:

19:50:45 PlexAPI: {'name': 'Gordos-2', 'accesstoken': '', 'address': '10.0.1.33:32400', 'ip': '10.0.1.33', 'scheme': 'http', 'local': '1', 'port': '32400', 'owned': '1', 'baseURL': 'http://10.0.1.33:32400'}
 

It shows the name as being "Gordos-2" but that is NOT the name of the Mac at 10.0.1.33. It should be called "MacTV" (you can see it a bit higher up):

19:50:45 PlexAPI:
 
 
 

Could this be what's causing the problem?

At 19:58 I quite the server running on Kats-Computer, and also the one on Gordos-2. That didn't seem to fix the problem, although Kats-Computer no longer shows up in the PlexConnect log.

At 20:02 I pulled the plug on the aTV to reboot it.

At 20:04 I stopped PlexConnect.

Any ideas?

[PlexConnect]
enable_plexgdm = False
ip_pms = 10.0.1.33
port_pms = 32400
enable_dnsserver = True
port_dnsserver = 53
ip_dnsmaster = 10.0.1.1
prevent_atv_update = True
enable_plexconnect_autodetect = False
ip_plexconnect = 10.0.1.33
hosttointercept = www.icloud.com
port_webserver = 80
enable_webserver_ssl = True
port_ssl = 443
certfile = ./assets/certificates/trailers.pem
loglevel = High
logpath = .
 

I had to separate the log file because it was too large.

9

Um lets back up a bit, how many PMS devices do you have on your network (before you only mentioned one)?

Also you talk about using Crackle, are you talking about hijacking that instead or..?

10

Also you say that you have the following:

Local aTV IP: 10.0.1.43

But the log says:

09:04:53 WebServer: PlexConnect options:
{'aTVScreenResolution': '720', 'PlexConnectUDID': 'C07FK1HEDDR5', 'aTVFirmwareVersion': '6.2.1', 'aTVLanguage': 'en', 'aTVAddress': '10.0.1.46'}
 
Please provide a list of ALL your PMS/PlexConnect/ATV devices and their IP addresses and if you have set DHCP reservations for them (if you have been hard coding these values and they are changing then of course things are going to break).
Just remember that we can only go on the information you give us so multiple other device just appearing and IP addresses changing kind of throws us of a bit :)
11

It shows the name as being "Gordos-2" but that is NOT the name of the Mac at 10.0.1.33. It should be called "MacTV" (you can see it a bit higher up):


Did you just rename the Mac or also the PMS?
12

Sorry, guys...

I have one PMS that I use to serve content (MacTV), the other ones were from old versions of Plex that were installed on computers that were rarely used (back when Plex and PSM were one app); they were never used to serve content (there was nothing configured there). I've deleted both of those old versions off their respective computers, so now I have a single PMS on my network (MacTV).

f00b4r, you're right, I messed up the aTV ip. It should be 10.0.1.46. Everything else is correct.

As for Crackle: I'm not hijacking the app, I was just talking about the usage of the standard Crackle app on the aTV, and how it was behaving. I'm hijacking "iMovie Theater" to use with Plex.

Did you just rename the Mac or also the PMS?

The computer MacTV (named in the system preferences) has always had the friendly name "MacTV" in Plex. It's never been called something different.

13

Change the line in settings.cfg to read Google's DNS and reboot the ATV and PlexConnect machine (lets remove any router lookups from the equation):

ip_dnsmaster = 8.8.8.8

If you are having issues with other applications then it is definitely a network issue; non-hijacked apps just get looked up using the ip_dnsmaster address (hence why i suggest you change it back to Google's 8.8.8.8. for testing).

Now we have removed your router doing DNS lookups and irrelevant older PMS installs from the equation post another log when you see the issue again; make sure to let us know the timings as the logs can get pretty big very quickly.

We will figure out what it is :D

14

Alright, DNS changed back to 8.8.8.8. This was what I started with, then changed it to my local DNS when I had problems.

Oh, the Mac was also updated to 10.7.5 (from 10.7.3). Apparently I had initiated the download awhile ago, and it just installed when I rebooted.

I'll report back if the problem occurs.

At first glance, things seem to be better:

09:36:38 PlexAPI: {'name': 'MacTV', 'accesstoken': '', 'address': '10.0.1.33:32400', 'ip': '10.0.1.33', 'scheme': 'http', 'local': '1', 'port': '32400', 'owned': '1', 'baseURL': 'http://10.0.1.33:32400'}
 

That's the right name for the PMS/Computer, and only the one PMS is showing up in the logs now. Cross your fingers!

15

OpenPlex is extremely limited on 10.7.5. It’s possible to use but very involved. If you get it working please post how in that topic. Otherwise you may find the manual method (PlexConnect wiki) much more user friendly on the lower OS X revision compared to OpenPlex.

16

Oh... OpenPlex wasn't an issue for me. I set it up under 10.7.3, with the only problem being that the progress bars didn't finish even when the activity was done. It's also working by starting and stopping PlexConnect. Would OpenPlex be better under 10.8?

17

10.9+

18

Well, I had the same problem happen again today. Last night PlexConnect was working fine (watched a movie on it), and this afternoon my wife when to load something up for my son and it was broken.

15:24:53 DNSServer: DNS request received!

That's the line of the first request today (line 296968). The rest of the material below that is PlexConnect not serving up data properly.

The file was too large for Pastebin, so I put it on DropBox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11267956/PlexConnect.log

19

Hmm nothing jumps out at me, although i still wonder if the IP address is getting screwed up via the Airport Express bridging somehow.

Maybe Baa can see something in the logs.

20

Yeah, I forgot to check to see where the ATV was connected last night when it went wonky. My son wanted to watch something, and it’s hard to make a toddler wait while you diagnose a problem :slight_smile:


I’ll ban the ATV from connecting to the airport express to rule it out.