Conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install

Plex Media Server
,
1

4 Days ago I started getting this message on files that previously worked fine.

Conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install.

Trying to figure out how to fix it as it seems to have affected almost my entire library. Very frustrating.

Server Version#:1.41.2.9200
Player Version#:4.140.0
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

2

Hello @robertring77
If your server is on macOS as you indicated in the tag, and the user running PMS is named robert, then you’ll find PMS downloads and stores the codecs it needs in a subfolder ending in -darwin-aarch64 if the Mac runs on Apple Silicon. For example:

/Users/robert/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/12345ab-123456789fe123a5978a79dd-darwin-aarch64

It’s safe to force PMS to download the codecs again. You could

  1. Stop PMS
  2. Move that -darwin-aarch64 subfolder out of ~/Library so PMS won’t see it.
  3. Start PMS, play your video.

PMS will recreate the missing folder and download the codecs it needs when you hit Play. This is exactly what happens when you install PMS.

If playback still fails, copy your Plex Media Server.log to your Downloads folder, right click the log and choose Compress to zip it up, and drop the zip into your reply.