Running PMS on my unRAID server. I’ve been testing Plex’s DVR and only about half my recordings are successful. The other half only record for about 10 seconds and then stop. Plex thinks it’s still recording but the files are no longer growing and no network traffic is coming from my tuners. Signal strength on my tuners is high, between 90 and 100%. Logs are inconclusive as to the problem. These are older HDHR’s. One is the oldest beige 2-tuner version and the other is the older black 2-tuner version. What’s going on?
My unRAID server is an i5 3470 using a PCIe Intel gigabit ethernet adapter.
I am considering switching from SageTV to Plex for recording but if I can’t get reliable behavior this is a deal breaker.
What specific models of HDHR do you have, and what version of PMS? It’s worth making sure that your server, and the firmware on your devices is up to date. What the connectivity like between the tuners and server?
I have an HDHR-US and an HDHR3-US both connected to a large antenna through a 3-way splitter. They are hooked to my unRAID server through a Netgear GS316 gigabit switch. Both have their latest firmwares. I’m running the latest public release of PMS.
Next time you see this, would you be able to grab some logs and post them, please?
The setup you’ve described doesn’t sound unusual (although those tuners are older models), so we’ll need the logs to try and determine what’s going on.
Ok, here are some logs. I turned on verbose logging a few days ago so there appears to be a lot of noise in there I think because I’m using Tautulli for monitoring. Anyway, I had two recordings going on my HDHR3 that started at 11:00am and ended at 12:00pm. Rachael Ray and Harry. I was messing around with playing them on my iPhone and the Harry recording got cancelled in the process. Either way they only captured about 11 seconds. When I tried playing Rachael Ray live from the beginning on my iPhone it showed the message “weak signal” at the bottom and then I just got a spinning circle until I was finally able to close playback.
Can you turn off verbose logging please, and recreate with only debug logging? The logs turn over too quickly, and are extremely noisy with verbose on. Verbose should only be used when specifically requested.
Not to jump in but I am having what seems to be an almost identical issue. My setup is a bit different, and my recordings last longer than ~10 seconds, but essentially it’s the same symptom: the recordings often stop early (though sometimes it works fine) and I can’t figure out why. In my case they will go for a minute or two, or for 30-40 minutes and then stop. Usually this results in viewable “partial recordings” in Plex, but a few times in the last couple of days the files have been completely unviewable, and I saw “An error occurred while postprocessing the recording.” Error details showed:
Media
Web Optimized No
Channel Identifier 27.1
Media Grab Begins At 1529967600
Media Grab Device device://tv.plex.grabbers.hdhomerun/10571575
Media Grab Error An error occurred while postprocessing the recording
Media Grab Original Duration -1
Media Grab Post Processed 1
Media Grab Status error
Origin dvr
My tuner is an HDHR Extend, model HDTC-2US. My server is running on Windows 10. I attached logs in case that helps. And if my issue is not related to Taddeusz’s then I apologize and will create a separate thread…Plex Media Server Logs_2018-06-27_22-31-03.zip (3.7 MB)
Update: I found from Event Viewer that a system optimization program from my motherboard manufacturer apparently re-enabled sleep mode on my computer, and I think that has been causing my trouble over the last few days. I will update if it happens again now that I’ve disabled sleep mode (again).
Ok, verbose logging is off. Had some weirdness yesterday so I couldn’t produce anything meaningful. Today though, was interesting. Plex apparently crashed at 10:00 when I presume it attempted to start recording. However, it did record the two concurrent programs from 10:00-11:00. It then got about 13 seconds of the two concurrent programs from 11:00-12:00.
These logs appear incomplete, please don’t remove parts of the log, as it hinders investigation. Could you also please tell me what shows you were attempting to record from 11:00 to 12:00?
I’m going to do some further testing but I think I might have this problem figured out. I’ve been testing this along side SageTV because I don’t want to tear it down before I’ve fully vetted the Plex DVR. I had a thought today that maybe SageTV is doing something to interfere with Plex recording. So just before noon I stopped my SageTV Docker and have been recording back-to-back since then and all of them have been “successful”. I put that in quotes because I’ve been keeping track of network stats on my unRAID server to monitor what’s happening. I seem to have discovered a different problem.
I noticed the recordings that were being made were disappearing and that it was taking nearly 20 seconds for the next hour’s shows to start recording. I just noticed that PMS has apparently been crashing at the end of each hour and it’s taking 20 seconds for PMS to restart. And as a side effect the prior hour recordings that it made just before the crash are also being deleted rather than being imported.
So, still unreliable but in a different way. Like I said, I’m going to do further testing this week by stopping my SageTV Docker during the day for testing just to verify the initial issue has been solved.
Another mostly successful day of test recordings without SageTV running. I did have one crash at 3:00pm that lost the 2:00-3:00pm recordings. Better than yesterday but still lost recordings.
