"Error - Conversion Failed" on movies that used to play fine

General Discussions
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve a whole bunch of movies and shows that suddenly won’t play anymore, but used to play fine. Some of them are halfway through. I’ll click to watch, it will ask “resume from 13:23 or play from beginning”, I’ll choose either of those, and then after some time watching the spinning circle it says “Error. Conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install”.

I’ve noticed this on both Android and iOS, phones and tablets.

Anyway able to shed some light? Is it part of a recent upgrade? I’m running server version 1.1.4.2757 on Ubuntu 14.04.

I’ve put a screengrab here.

2

I started experiencing the same issue late last night. PMS 1.2.2.2857 running on Win 10 and Roku clients.

I was 3/4 of the way through an episode on a Roku when it stopped playing and wouldn’t play again after that. Today I’ve tried other shows and movies from Roku or Chrome browser on Win 10 PC running PMS and on the PC it gives ‘Conversion failed. The transcoder crashed or failed to start up’.

3

All of my movies work(which is a lot) but none of my tv shows or cartoons (also a lot) won’t work. I get conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install. I upgraded to the newest release and it messed everything up. I rolled back to a previous release and they seemed to work. I didn’t check everything though.

4

I also rolled back to an earlier release and everything is working properly now.

5

This is a little frustrating… to say the least. Is there a bug logged for this?

6

Same here after upgrading to latest 1.2.7 PMS on my Synology. How can I roll back?

7

Turns out it was a DNS issue for me.

In the Plex Media Server.log I see the following when it is trying to start the transcoding for my Android or Chromecast clients:

Nov 09, 2016 21:54:28.879 [0xeb155b70] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'h264' (profile 'high') Nov 09, 2016 21:54:28.880 [0xeb155b70] DEBUG - Downloading document https://plex.tv/api/codecs/h264_decoder?build=linux-synology-i686&deviceId=ed578614-3c2d-4752-9eaf-48b02cb8a756&oldestPreviousVersion=legacy&version=5a2d9a2-1127 Nov 09, 2016 21:54:28.880 [0xeb155b70] DEBUG - HTTP requesting GET https://plex.tv/api/codecs/h264_decoder?build=linux-synology-i686&deviceId=ed578614-3c2d-4752-9eaf-48b02cb8a756&oldestPreviousVersion=legacy&version=5a2d9a2-1127 Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] ERROR - Error issuing curl_easy_perform(handle): 6 Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] WARN - HTTP error requesting GET https://plex.tv/api/codecs/h264_decoder?build=linux-synology-i686&deviceId=ed578614-3c2d-4752-9eaf-48b02cb8a756&oldestPreviousVersion=legacy&version=5a2d9a2-1127 (0, No error) (Couldn't resolve host 'plex.tv') Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] ERROR - HTTP -6 downloading url https://plex.tv/api/codecs/h264_decoder?build=linux-synology-i686&deviceId=ed578614-3c2d-4752-9eaf-48b02cb8a756&oldestPreviousVersion=legacy&version=5a2d9a2-1127 Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] ERROR - Codecs: Failed to download XML for codec 'h264'/'high'; dec=1 Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] ERROR - Error configuring transcoder: Codec install failed Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeb155b70] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Terminated session 0xef917df4:8ea3fbb58ad8d11b-com-plexapp-android with reason Conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install. Nov 09, 2016 21:54:29.133 [0xeba23b70] DEBUG - Killing job.

Fixing the DNS on the Synology running the PMS fixed the issue for me!