Hello, I am having a problem with the DVR recording shows with the plex pass. I have a homerun HD, and tuning to the stations on plex works fine. I setup the DVR to record a show every time it airs, but every time it tries records it, it only records like 50 seconds, or 1 minute, or 0 seconds of the 1 hour show. I tested the system once, by manually selecting a different show to record within a couple hours, and it seems to record fine. I know it is not a space issue either, as there is plenty of space on the drive. I would greatly appreciate anyones help getting this working. I looked through the logs, and couldnt find anything that was helpful, but I really dont know what I was looking for either though.
Do you have plex set to automatically remove commercials? if so, try turning that off for a recording and see what happens… It could be comskip chopping out too much of the show, it’s happened to me before… I’ve never gotten a 0 seconds file, but I have gotten something that was only 5 minutes long… despite me watching it record…
If that’s not it, you will have to provide the logs from when a show was recording that this happened on so we can determine what’s wrong.
Thanks for the reply, and your help.
No I do not have it attempting to remove the commercials. I have attached the logs, please let me know what you think.
The show is Dateline NBC.
I read through the logs, and I am having trouble making out exactly what went wrong, but I am just a user like you, and DVR is not my forte, so someone else may have to answer it…
Thanks man. Anyone else want to chime in and help?
@BigWheel and @OttoKerner are usually helpful in these matters, hopefully one of them see’s I’ve tagged them and takes a peek 
I am trying to find this in the logs. The only evidence I see of dvr / livetv activity is the 26 September 21:12 live tv session started from Plex for Android app for channel 39.1
This was not a scheduled recording and was live tv
This livetv session was stopped / cancelled by the Plex for Android app at 21:13:17
The logs cover a very long period of time: September 14 to September 27 - so within this period I would expect to see evidence of what you stated
it only records like 50 seconds, or 1 minute
Can you tell me when you believe these 1 minute or so recordings happened
I can see some errors when trying to get info about the series - but I do not see any 1 minute or similar recordings
I am going to look further to see if I missed the recording of the Dateline NBC epside
Found another live tv session after the initial one - this was at 21:13 (after stopping 39.1 channel mentioned earlier) and this one was on channel 15.1
What times were the scheduled recordings for Dateline NBC?
Thank you for your help!
Here is one that happened 2 days ago.
Can you please help me by telling me the time of each of these curtailed recordings and the channel. These are August 2019 and a 2018 episode so cannot tell from the screenshots that they were recorded in September 2019
The only DVR activity I can see in the logs which cover September 14 to September 30 are these
- September 26 2019 from 21.12.54 to 21.13.17 channel 39.1 live tv session for android app on Amazon Fire TV
- September 26 2019 from 21.13.17 to 21.27.40 channel 15.1 live tv session for android app on Amazon Fire TV
and please could you bring your server to the current release. It is still on 1.16.6.1592-b9d49bdb7
See plex.tv/downloads for the current version
Sure. I looked through the interface, but cannot find the section that states when it was recorded, can you please let me know where to look?
I know that the show comes on channel 39.1. The last one (Sept 28th) it was supposed to record at 9pm PST on Sept 28th. I know because that is a new episode and thats when they air. Hopefully you can diagnose from this one.
Heres the XML info from another episode. Maybe you can pull the record date from that…
dateline.xml.zip (2.0 KB)
Also, I updated the platform, as your request.
Lastly, in looking at another DVR show recording, the same problem is happening. It actually picked up a different dateline show, dateline sms on a different station 8.1, and it is doing partial recordings.
Now in manually scheduling a different show to record, (just going to guide ahead in time, and selecting record), it records the full show properly.
The automatic periodic guide refresh does not pick up all EPG updates and until we have this happen automatically overnight doing a full EPG refresh, it is necessary to do a manual refresh regularly - so may be we have inaccurate EPG data that get updated later but the updates do not get updated.
Lets do a full guide refresh now - through settings / server / Live TV and DVR
and then check your recording schedule in Plex Web to see that the episodes do show up.
And then we wait until the issue arises again and get screenshots /logs
And try to do a manual refresh every 24 hours
The last activities on this were in August
For any recording, you can always go to the directory and see when the file was last written
e.g.
/Volumes/Media 1/Tv Shows/Dateline NBC (1992)/Season 2019/Dateline NBC (1992) - 2019-08-12 22 00 00 - Dateline NBC.ts
Ok great. I did everything that you asked. The next episode comes on Friday at 9PST. Hope we get it fixed!
Hello. So plex attempted to record the episode on Friday - Oct 4th at 9PST. When I opened it up about 10 minutes in, it said it failed. So I manually opened the channel in plex. It looks like it picked up the recording from there and recorded about 1hr 40 min. I have attached the logs if you could see what happened.
There was also something else scheduled to record at the same time and it failed as well. That episode was 20/20. Again it looks like when I manually went in 20 minutes later, it somehow started recording this episode and got a portion of it. So in total it got 1 31mins of the total 2 hrs.
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-10-06_17-09-53.zip (5.7 MB)
What Tuner/Capture device are you using? Does it have enough tuners to do everything you require?
You will need a tuner for each instance of recording and each instance of viewing…
So, if you have 2 tuners, and you have 2 things set to record, no one can watch anything… conversely, if you have 2 people watching, and recordings scheduled, the recordings will fail… I am unsure how this works when something is already recording and someone attempts to tune to a channel, I dunno if the recording or the live viewing takes priority…
Also, if it’s an HD HomeRun, and someone tunes using the HD HomeRun software, I am usure if it takes priority away from Plex or not…
Someone versed in Plex logs will have to look at your log files, but these are things to consider while you’re waiting on a reply
