@Toffs said:
My non-HD test has just finished, seems to be fine and back to the ‘original’ .ts
It once played out to be lazy, didn’t want to update my DVR MCEBuddy & Comskip Guide and now I don’t have to anymore
@Wiidesire said:
@Toffs said:
My non-HD test has just finished, seems to be fine and back to the ‘original’ .ts
It once played out to be lazy, didn’t want to update my DVR MCEBuddy & Comskip Guide and now I don’t have to anymore
Haha - nice one ! 
@mcrommert said:
So…1.7.6 is reverting all recordings to mpegts? (based on notes) Has anyone tested this…i’m a little gun shy at this point
Upgrading from 1.6.1 to 1.76 as we speak. Once it records a few shows I’ll report back.
@nsantalu
I Loaded 1.7.6 and I am seeing ts files being recorded and look clean, I did have one issue not sure if its anomaly or not it never finished a recording that was scheduled to end at 2pm , I did see a log entry on plex server about unable to update something in plex so I reinstalled over tope of itself to see if that corrected problem after I adjusted permissions and error has gone away, waiting on test recording to verify all is working and TS files are good.
@skraemertx I have 2 shows recording now… I added 2 others just for testing but both are giving “An unknown error occurred” for the current and future recordings… not sure what that is all about.
Looks like the issue still exists for me with PMS 1.7.6.4058.
I guess I’ll need to go back to 1.6.1 again 
Well new version records ts files but never finishes recording a show after its over. downgraded back to 1.6. plex as new version 1.7.6 still not ready for prime time.
@skraemertx said:
Well new version records ts files but never finishes recording a show after its over. downgraded back to 1.6. plex as new version 1.7.6 still not ready for prime time.
Yup, sounds about right.
Agreed… Recording issues continue… 1.6.1 for now
New version seems to be working for me, have recorded 13 shows today since installing 1.7.6. Many of which were test recordings to see how it handled multiple recordings at the same time. Previous 1.7.5 version I could not record more than 2 shows at the same time. Was able to have 5 recordings at the same time with 1.7.6. Subtitles/Closed Captioning seems to be in the files again, I don’t personally need to use them but have seen the streams in the file as shown in my post this morning on page 6 of this thread. I will be sticking with this release for a while, or until I encounter an issue. Still have my prior downloaded versions so can revert back to 1.6.1 if necessary.
@johnm_ColaSC said:
New version seems to be working for me, have recorded 13 shows today since installing 1.7.6. Many of which were test recordings to see how it handled multiple recordings at the same time. Previous 1.7.5 version I could not record more than 2 shows at the same time. Was able to have 5 recordings at the same time with 1.7.6. Subtitles/Closed Captioning seems to be in the files again, I don’t personally need to use them but have seen the streams in the file as shown in my post this morning on page 6 of this thread. I will be sticking with this release for a while, or until I encounter an issue. Still have my prior downloaded versions so can revert back to 1.6.1 if necessary.
Glad to hear it is working form someone. I’m currently updating my Windows to the latest release to see if that helps… then I’ll try 1.7.6 again.
Rebooting both of my HDHomerun boxes and restarting Plex (not sure this was necessary) seems to have resolved the issue. The test show I recorded completed successfully and doesn’t show a red record circle. It shows the grey play triangle like it should.
@rodgerzeisler said:
Rebooting both of my HDHomerun boxes and restarting Plex (not sure this was necessary) seems to have resolved the issue. The test show I recorded completed successfully and doesn’t show a red record circle. It shows the grey play triangle like it should.
It was a fluke. I tried it again with 4 more recordings and all of them still show recording, 100% complete, red circle.
I just may have got my Plex working on PMS 1.7.6.4058… I’ve recorded 4 shows sucessfully so far but I won’t declare success until more time has passed.
One thing that I noticed that is different between 1.6.1 and 1.7.6 is that the shows remain with the red recording dot during post-processing (with MCEBuddy & ComSkip). With 1.6.1 and earlier the red dot went away and the play button showed up after the post-processing completed. With 1.7.6 the red dot stays there until the post-processing completes and then it changes to a play button.
Below is what I did to improve the situation.
- I moved my HDHomerun Extend tuners to another room and have them out in the open rather than inside an entertainment center where they were getting crazy hot.
- I rotated my roof antenna to the position I seem to get the best reception overall for the majority of the channels I watch.
- I used the HDHomerun software to check each channel one at a time for good signal and picture quality and manually disabled the channels that didn’t look good on the HDHomeRun Channel Lineup pages. I should point out that the “bad” channels all look perfectly fine on my TVs but apparently the HDHomeRun tuners aren’t as good at picking up the signal as real TVs are which kinda sucks because some of the channels I had to disable have shows I would have liked to record.
- Afterwards I did a re-scan from DVR settings within Plex and all the channels I had disabled on the HDHomeRun channel lineup pages were no longer found and as such the shows on the bad channels no longer show up in my program guide (unless they also aired on a good channel) so there is no chance Plex will try to record from those channels.
I’ll post back sometime tomorrow to let you all know if I continue to have success or if I’ll need to revert back to 1.6.1 again.
@mavrrick said:
@Agent_Cooper
Is that first paragraph something I wrote from another thread. It looks very familar
Yes, that’s why it says at the top of the post “@mavrrick said:” this indicates that I’ve quoted your post and am replying to it.
So any assertion that the problem is effecting everyone is false. I personally experienced a 75% success rate on 4 different OS installs. That isn’t great, but it is a majority It has something to do with the environment. I do agree with you though it is likely something to do with the new transcoder and i have a feeling it is related to some sort of minor signal loss issue. I also believe it may involved with the transcoder leaning on something shared by many software packages that do transcoding. It could be a simple as something like a codec pack or dll that resides outside plex that should be updated, but for reason hasn’t been.
I didn’t personally assert that ‘everyone’ was experiencing this problem. Though I’m sure that to those of us that are, it may feel that way.
One of the changes I recently read about on this forum (that maybe everyone else already knew, but I’d missed) was that prior to 1.7.x, each recording was a single file, recorded as the transmission came to the server. After 1.7.x, rather than one big file they switched to breaking the recording into several small files that then get remuxed into a single file once the recording completes. My guess is that if ‘any/many’ of these small files get messed up during the recording process (signal loss, a drive or filesystem that can’t keep up, etc.) that the remuxed file will end up being corrupted. Kind of like trying to put together a puzzle after a dog has chewed up a bunch of the pieces. I also suspect that this might explain the issue that has been reported where people have recordings that don’t complete and just hang at 100%…Plex Server is trying to put all those broken pieces together but can’t because the pieces are all chewed up, but it keeps on trying anyway.
As I’ve said before…I don’t know anything about all the technical aspect of this so I’m basically just guessing based on my personal experience.
I’m still hoping to see some more first-hand reports of people that have had success with this most recent version (though I doubt simply switching back to .ts files will make much difference, except for the issues of closed-captioning).
@Agent_Cooper
If i remember correctly i don’t think i intended to direct that at you.
I believe i was one of the first person to bring up that change from many to one. You can observe it if you review your plex transcode folder during a recording. You will see a folder created and underneath that folder will be hundreds/thousands of tiny TS files. Once the recording is suppose to end you will see the same folder created in the .grab folder and you will see a single file that is growing in size. Was MKV now TS. So if you want to observe it that is how you would do it. I think your explanation is spot on as a good example. Like many others i wish there was a smoking gun to what is causing the problem. You are also right about the hanging recordings because what you explained was also what I saw when my system was experiencing the problem. This was also why some recordings were very short because of potential missing parts
I have also seen it confirmed by a plex employee that this is exactly the case. When i was saying it originally saying it i determined it from observations. With 1.7.6 he confirmed that though we are back to the TS container but we are still doing the same muxing step to combine the files into a single file. The change back to TS was to resolve a problem with Closed Captioning.
Tried the new PMS v1.7.6 today and did a short stress test using three sets of back-back recordings on all three tuners of my HDHR Prime.
Happy to see that the .ts transport stream recordings are back and glitch free.
Only thing I noticed and can’t explain is that there are two transcoder processes running for each recording, each one is eating up around 2% CPU on my NAS.
i.e. If one recording there are two transcoder processes running, if three recordings there are six transcoder processes running.
The recording appears to be going direct to the .grab folder and I can see the .ts file there growing as it records.
Decided to enable debug logging to see if I could figure out why these transcoder processes are running since I’m not asking PMS to remux/transcode/optimize recordings and have no post recording scripts.
I enabled debug logging, shutdown PMS and restarted PMS. Am waiting for three scheduled back-back recordings to start in 1.5 hours and will report back what I find after trying to decipher the logs.
If anyone knows why the new PMS version 1.7.6 has to run two transcoder processes per recording, I would like to know.
Not sure why there would be two for each recording, but the transcode is probably related to Live TV. If you watch a recording there is a transcode folder created that hundreds of small ts files are created in a cache ranscode\sessions folder. When the recording is done all of these small files must be combined into a single file. Started a recording at 8:46 pm, you can see all the files created in less than two minutes of recording in the image below.
My test is done and v1.7.6 is giving me what I wanted with a .ts Transport Stream Recording as delivered by my HDHR Prime (MPEG2 or H.264 depending on the broadcast) without any errors and without re-muxing to something not native. I still don’t understand why PMS has two transcoder processes running per DVR recording (still looking at debug logs to determine why), since I didn’t ask PMS to do anything but record the native .ts stream from my HDHR Prime and put it in the recorded folder…
Maybe you have LiveTV or something else enabled? I don’t and wonder why it’s still transcoding/remuxing/whatever my recordings to who knows where.
I’ve kinda given up on PMS DVR and am still relying on my aging TiVo since I can set manual recordings on it to record the new OLYHD Olympic Channel content since it went live a couple days ago, even though the Plex DVR and TiVo Guide doesn’t list the new channel yet for my provider (it replaced the UHD Channel). I’m relying on the DIRECTV program listings for my area to see what’s available and manual TiVo CH/TIME recordings (aka VCR type) to record them.
@Plexer223 doesn’t matter whether you use Live TV or not. In order to support Live TV Plex started creating these tiny files in the transcode directory for all recordings and when watching Live TV.
