Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171 on QNAP
Player Version#:
I thought this had been fixed a couple years ago, but I guess it’s back.
The last two weeks I’ve had shows record back to back on the same channel where there wasn’t enough tuners for every upcoming recording to get a free tuner and the next in line is missing half a minute or so of it’s beginning.
I usually add 4 minutes to the end of my recordings, and this is roughly where Plex is starting the next show on the same channel (minus about 30 seconds that doesn’t show in either recording so I can’t even piece it back together).
Only when I’m out of tuners and Plex seems to need another one. IF all your tuners are engaged, Plex can’t pull another one out of it’s magic hat - it just has to wait until a tuner is available.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, Plex is, in this case, doing all it can do.
If that tuner is engaged on that first recording - I’m guessing it can’t start another recording until - you guessed it - another tuner opens up.
This could probably be twiddled with at Plex HQ, but in the meantime, if you happen to notice back to back shows - you can adjust the start and end time to be ‘exact’ - if you know what I mean.
I don’t know if i was just hallucinating or if plex just non-deterministically decides to do it on occasion…but I was recording 10+ hours of back to back to back shows on the same channel, each with one extra minute, and I saw plex leave a single tuner active the whole time and apparently “share” it. I verified with hdhr logs that only a single stream was ever opened. In the plex logs it indicated another consumer on the “feeder” when the shows overlapped. Each of them is the correct length 1:01:00. When the same scenario was happening yesterday each time I looked a different light was lit up, so yesterday it appears it wasn’t operating the same way.
The most important bit though? Be sure you disable ‘allow partial recordings’
Hmmm… I do recall Channels being able to ‘share’ tuners, and that may be a function of the HDHR device, possibly activated by the client that’s in charge of it. Channels did it, maybe Plex isn’t doing it.
The thing is plex doesn’t record any stream directly. The shove the bits it into a segmenter and tamper with it doing who knows what. They could ref count access to that segmenter very easily if they wanted to, which by my looking at plex+hdhr logs to see what was accessed seemed to indicate it can happen in some scenarios.
I think this is a reverted problem. I remember in the early versions of the DVR Plex couldn’t share the tuner, but they eventually fixed it. Last Fall it recorded these kind of back to back episodes just fine.
It is something in Plex (or just on my system) that has changed since all the shows went on their Christmas 2019 break last year.
From the “Fixes” section of the release notes for 1.16.5.1488:
(Live) In some circumstances, new recordings could use an additional tuner, rather than sharing one already tuning the same channel. This could manifest as a missing “watch from start” option (#9736)
I tried to duplicate the problem this afternoon, but didn’t see a repeat of the problem when I recorded three channels at once for a few hours.
I don’t know if a Plex tech could find anything weird the logs from yesterday’s problem. The shows that screwed up were the transition between Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow which aired 1/21/2020.
all three channels had overlap for every recording? I fear this has edge cases to cause failure, like simultaneous guide refreshes or something. Sometimes I’ve failed after 3hr, sometimes it’s taken 8hr.
I would love to see this bug finally fixed, because it’s pretty much the sole reason my recordings ever fail…for over a year.
