I have a few questions that I believe mostly come back to a single issue.
First, I run a Pi-Hole dns server on my Lan for all dns queries and recently I’ve noticed an uptick in requests from my Ubuntu Server running Plex in a docker container. It seems that roughly 2-4 times every few seconds to a minute the Ubuntu server is looking for “10-20-1-4.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345.plex.direct.home”. This request is being returned as an NXDOMAIN since my DNS doesn’t recognize it as a local device.
Issue 2 when I checked the logs I found these lines repeated several times (The log file is 83,000 lines).
Aug 22, 2020 15:36:02.891 [0x7f1932ffd700] ERROR - getaddrinfo(10-20-1-4.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345.plex.direct) failed: -5
Aug 22, 2020 15:36:02.979 [0x7f18f7fff700] INFO - Network Service: Abandoning browse socket, it was closed.
Aug 22, 2020 15:36:02.979 [0x7f18f7fff700] ERROR - Network Service: Error in browser handle read: 125 (Operation canceled) socket=-1
This is more of a question than and issue, and unrelated to these 2 (Unless I’m not finding it due to the large log file). Is there a log entry that outputs in a predictable format when something is being watched on the server or even better when the server needs to transcode something? I want to run a script to search the log file for this so that when a transcode is in progress, a different program that is highly cpu intensive can be stopped temporarily to allow for faster transcoding.
With debug logging enabled, whenever video playback starts a block of log entries containing “MDE:” is created. it will be similar to this:
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: Selected protocol dash; container: mp4
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: analyzing media item 13538
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: Direct Play is disabled
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: media must be transcoded in order to use the dash protocol
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: no direct play video profile exists for http/mpegts/mpeg2video
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: no direct play video profile exists for http/mpegts/mpeg2video/ac3
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: no direct play video profile exists for http/mpegts/mpeg2video/ac3
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.133 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: E14 - One-Punch Opie: no remuxable profile found, so video stream will be transcoded
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.179 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: Cannot direct stream video stream due to profile or setting limitations
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.180 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: Cannot direct stream audio stream due to codec ac3 when profile only allows aac
Aug 22, 2020 17:55:43.180 [0x70000d006000] DEBUG - MDE: The Andy Griffith Show - S3 E14 - One-Punch Opie: selected media 0 / 13538
This block of logging should contain all the information you need to determine when playback starts and whether or not it is being direct played, direct streamed, or transcoded (for audio and video).
Are you looking at Plex Media Server.log? Are there any lines with “DEBUG” present at all? As far as I know, those MDE lines should be present whenever playback starts. This is the Media Decision Engine determining whether or not media can be played directly or needs to be transcoded; it also gives some information as to why that decision is made.
