This has only affects certain shows from one OTA network channel (FOX) in my locale. The other OTA network channels from my HDHomerun EXTEND record just fine on Plex so we can rule out prohibited write access. This has happened on three separate Plex installs and it always fails recording from the FOX network channel. It first happened with Plex on Ubuntu. Then CentOS. Now I have Plex installed in a FreeBSD jail which, in the beginning, every show I scheduled for recording actually did record to the hard drive and I could play them on my Plex client. But after the first day or two of having installed Plex in the jail it then decided to refuse to record AND create the corresponding show file on my hard drive. I’ve checked the status of my HDHomerun while Plex claims to be recording one of my shows on FOX and that station is in fact showing to be locked to Plex at the time. So if Plex is going through all the motions of recording the show and after the recording ends it says “Successfully Recorded” it, where is the file?
Notice there is no play button next to the episodes which didn’t actually record:
Plex says it recorded Cops:
There is no Cops recording in the directory it should be had it actually recorded:
A few of these recordings were from my previous Plex setup which did record Judge Judy but not Cops from the FOX network channel.
Is it stuck in the .grab folder?
@johnm_ColaSC said:
Is it stuck in the .grab folder?
How do I find out? I checked inside the .grab directory but nothing exists. It’s empty.
I have no idea if this makes any difference, but I have three directories mounted for Plex TV. Could this in any way cause confusion for Plex DVR?
/mnt/tank/tv ## NOT write accessible by Plex. Plex can only read from this directory.
/mnt/tank/plex/tv ## Write accessible by Plex. Used to record shows I want to keep long term.
/mnt/scratch/plex/tv ## Write accessible by Plex. Used for short-term recordings.
Since you have multiple directories for TV are they all under the same library? If so are you looking in the correct directory where Plex is save the recording to? In other words is Plex set to save recording to /mnt/tank/plex/tv?
I have 3 different locations for my Plex library as well. Some shows go to my E: drive, some to my F: drive, and some get moved by a script to my Dropbox account so Plex Cloud can see them but I also want my Plex Server to see them so my TV Shows Library has access to the Dropbox folder as well.
In the recording dialog, you can see which folder it’s recording too.
Click on one of them and see what it says?
@keithah said:
In the recording dialog, you can see which folder it’s recording too.Click on one of them and see what it says?
I understand what you’re saying and I have tried changing which directory the DVR records these shows to. It does the same thing. Says it successfully recorded the episode but that episode never shows up in the Plex Web UI and when I check the underlying server itself, no recording was ever written to disk. As previously mentioned, this doesn’t happen to every DVR recording—only a select few shows which happen to be on the same television network. My other recordings happily write to the same drive(s) without issue.
Next time one of these fail, grab the Plex Media Server log and post it. That should say why it didn’t copy, so we can figure out a way to get that error up to the client.
Another thing to check is whether you have any deletion policies in place, either at the show level within the library, or on the recording settings 
I have the exact same problem - could it be due to reception issues? I don’t have the greatest antenna setup and the occasional glitch is unavoidable. I’ve been running Plex DVR for a few days and have only successfully recorded 2 programs.
Seems like Plex deletes recordings if mpeg2video (or other postprocessing script) returns an error.
All of the failed recordings have entries in the Plex Media Server.log hinting at corrupted streams. A few examples from my own logs:
Jun 02, 2017 21:00:04.303 [0x7f840bffe700] ERROR - Unable to find title for item of type 5
Jun 02, 2017 21:00:04.303 [0x7f840bffe700] ERROR - get - invalid frameRate value: 29.970
[...]
Jun 04, 2017 21:56:05.746 [0x7f11afffd700] ERROR - [Transcoder] [ac3 @ 0x1c51f00] invalid coupling range (13 >= 10)
Jun 04, 2017 21:56:05.747 [0x7f11b27ff700] ERROR - [Transcoder] [ac3 @ 0x1c51f00] error decoding the audio block
Jun 04, 2017 21:56:05.812 [0x7f11ddbff700] ERROR - [Transcoder] [mpeg2video @ 0x1c51a40] mb incr damaged
Jun 04, 2017 21:56:05.814 [0x7f11acfff700] ERROR - [Transcoder] [mpeg2video @ 0x1c51a40] 00 motion_type at 6 23
[...]
Jun 05, 2017 03:30:01.751 [0x7f11b0fff700] ERROR - [Transcoder] [mpeg2video @ 0x2c02b20] Invalid frame dimensions 0x0.
Yes, bad signal can definitely cause issues like this.
@keithah said:
Next time one of these fail, grab the Plex Media Server log and post it. That should say why it didn’t copy, so we can figure out a way to get that error up to the client.
Ok. So today Plex managed to record one episode of Judge Judy alright (A new airing btw) but failed at the second scheduled recording which took place on June 5th from 16:30-17:00. I’ll post the most recent log file which contains that info.
@DaveBinM said:
Another thing to check is whether you have any deletion policies in place, either at the show level within the library, or on the recording settings
They are set to record 7 days of Judge Judy and delete after a week. I switched it (temporarily) to never delete any recordings.
@keithah said:
Yes, bad signal can definitely cause issues like this.
This network channel has one of the best signal strength and signal quality ratings according to a signal app I have on my iPhone which reads from my HDHomerun. In the past I’ve had some really bad DVR recordings from other channels that still recorded normally.
If you had the recording initially set to delete after seven days you need to check the Library Show Settings to ensure it is not set to delete after seven days. DVR seems to set Library but not change it later. If the other airing is more than seven days since original air date it probably recorded then immediately deleted.
@johnm_ColaSC said:
If you had the recording initially set to delete after seven days you need to check the Library Show Settings to ensure it is not set to delete after seven days. DVR seems to set Library but not change it later. If the other airing is more than seven days since original air date it probably recorded then immediately deleted.
If that is the case, it would explain the problem and why only the new episode of Judge Judy did record. As I have mentioned before, Plex shows recording progress while the show is presumably being recorded and my Plex server is locking out that channel on the HDHomerun while the recording is taking place. So everything points to it getting recorded. If Plex immediately deletes the episode based on the original air date then it’s a bug IMHO that needs fixing.
The library does have different options for deleting. You can use the Keep option to keep only episodes from the past 7 days which does use the original air date, or the delete episodes after watching for 7 days which should do what you are wanting I believe.
@johnm_ColaSC said:
The library does have different options for deleting. You can use the Keep option to keep only episodes from the past 7 days which does use the original air date, or the delete episodes after watching for 7 days which should do what you are wanting I believe.
The shows which had DVR recording problems I have set all to save and never delete in both, the tv library and recording schedule. Will see in the next day or two if my recordings stay put.
Let us know how you go!
