ERROR - [Transcoder] [ac3_eae @ 0x2fd4f40] EAE timeout! EAE not running, or wrong folder ....

sa2000 · December 12, 2017, 1:23am

@Mogul345 said:
Ok, it happened again today. Tried to watch a .mkv with EAC3 5.1 using my Roku and it got stuck at 13%.

I checked in htop and the Plex EAE Service is running. Log was again full of errors about EAE timeout errors, and unable to read a .wav file in the /tmp directory.

@sa2000 - Attached are the PMS and Roku app logs.

After I collected the logs, I restarted the container, and it started working again. Weird!

Will have a look at the logs - but may be you do not have an installation as per the documented setup.

Just noticed you have tcp port 32401 for local network IP - how did that happen ?
192.168.1.230:32401
Are you using two routes to the server?
local ports 32400 and 32401 are reserved for use by plex media server

Can you please check your setup and make sure it is a setup as per the guidelines here

github.com

plexinc/pms-docker/blob/master/README.md

# Official Docker container for Plex Media Server

# plexinc/pms-docker

With our easy-to-install Plex Media Server software and your Plex apps, available on all your favorite phones, tablets, streaming devices, gaming consoles, and smart TVs, you can stream your video, music, and photo collections any time, anywhere, to any device.

## Usage

Before you create your container, you must decide on the type of networking you wish to use.  There are essentially three types of networking available:

- `bridge` (default)
- `host`
- `macvlan`

The `bridge` networking creates an entirely new network within the host and runs containers within there.  This network is connected to the physical network via an internal router and docker configures this router to forward certain ports through to the containers within.  The `host` networking uses the IP address of the host running docker such that a container's networking appears to be the host rather than separate.  The `macvlan` networking creates a new virtual computer on the network which is the container.  For purposes of setting up a plex container, the `host` and `macvlan` are very similar in configuration.

Using `host` or `macvlan` is the easier of the three setups and has the fewest issues that need to be worked around.  However, some setups may be restricted to only running in the `bridge` mode.  Plex can be made to work in this mode, but it is more complicated.

For those who use docker-compose, this repository provides the necessary YML template files to be modified for your own use.

This file has been truncated. show original

sa2000 · December 12, 2017, 1:37am

With regards to EAE - when you do the streaming that needs EAE for audio - can you see if the directories are actually being written to and files being created by the EAE process

The directory structure would be below
/tmp/pms-7ffc530d-1e2c-446e-8db7-4f33ca8e8ded/EasyAudioEncoder/
eg

/tmp/pms-7ffc530d-1e2c-446e-8db7-4f33ca8e8ded/EasyAudioEncoder/Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)/8abb22c9cb126688832b0734995d6e8a_25754-1-0.wav

This is an example - it may be different subdirectory below EasyAudioEncoder

and is /tmp accessible to the docker process ?

Mogul345 · December 12, 2017, 4:08am

I’m running a multi-server environment right now, as I have my original PMS install on my windows machine running alongside my PMS install in docker that is having the EAE issue. The windows PMS server is running on 32400 public, so for my docker install, I’ve set the public port to 32401.

According to the section about manual port forwards in the Troubleshooting Remote Access guide, this should be a valid external port to use. The internal port should still be set to 32400. You can check me, here’s the command I use to create my docker container:

docker run --restart=always \
        -d \
        --name plex \
        -p 32401:32400/tcp \
        -p 3005:3005/tcp \
        -p 8324:8324/tcp \
        -p 32469:32469/tcp \
        -p 1900:1900/udp \
        -p 32410:32410/udp \
        -p 32412:32412/udp \
        -p 32413:32413/udp \
        -p 32414:32414/udp \
        -e TZ="America/Los_Angeles" \
        -e PLEX_CLAIM=$CLAIMTOKEN \
        -e ADVERTISE_IP="http://192.168.1.230:32401/" \
        -e PLEX_GID=$GROUPID \
        -e PLEX_UID=$USERID \
        -h DOCKER-PLEX \
        -v $CONFIGDIR:/config \
        -v $TRANSCODEDIR:/transcode \
        -v /mnt/data:/data \
        plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass

I am a docker newb, but if I understand how docker networking works, the line -p 32401:32400/tcp should be the equivalent of mapping the external port 32401 to the internal port 32400 in the port forwarding documentation. On my router, I have 32401 forwarded to my docker host (which has a static IP set to 192.168.1.230). I’m manually setting my external port to 32401 in PMS settings as well.

Is this not a valid setup? Do I have to make my router map 32401 -> 32400 on my docker host, and then map 32400 into 32400 on the container?

sa2000 · December 12, 2017, 9:24am

You have misread the documentation

Two errors above

-p 32401:32400/tcp \

and

-e ADVERTISE_IP="http://192.168.1.230:32401/"

These should be

-p 32400:32400/tcp \

and

-e ADVERTISE_IP="http://192.168.1.230:32400/"

and separately from this

If you wish your Plex Media Server to be accessible outside of your home network, you must manually setup port forwarding on your router to forward to the ADVERTISE_IP specified above. By default you can forward port 32400, but if you choose to use a different external port, be sure you configure this in Plex Media Server’s Remote Access settings. With this type of docker networking, the Plex Media Server is essentially behind two routers and it cannot automatically setup port forwarding on its own.

So in your router public / wan port 32401 is port forwarded to port 32400 on 192.168.1.230
(note some very basic routers do not allow you to have different wan port from lan port - if this is so, you need to look for alternative router)
and in Remote Access server setting, tick manually specify port and enter 32401 as the public port

Mogul345 · December 13, 2017, 6:51am

Roger. For simplicity’s sake, I just fully decommissioned my old server, created a new container using the updated the docker run command as you indicated, and updated the port forward in my router to 32400 external -> 32400 internal.

After doing this, I managed to break things one more time by playing videos with EAC3 audio streams (last night, I figured out I could reliably break things by playing a video with an EAC3 audio stream, and seeking after play started. Once the Roku got stuck at 13%, the whole server is down, and no client would be able to connect to it until the container was restarted). I was tailing the server log at the time, though, and the EAE timeout error wasn’t occuring. So I restarted the container and have tried to break it again, and haven’t been successful. So for now, I guess I’ll call this fixed. Thanks for the help @sa2000.

Mogul345 · December 16, 2017, 8:35am

Ok @sa2000 it started happening again today. Here’s the command I used to run the container:

docker run --restart=always \
	-d \
	--name plex \
	-p 32400:32400/tcp \
	-p 3005:3005/tcp \
	-p 8324:8324/tcp \
	-p 32469:32469/tcp \
	-p 1900:1900/udp \
	-p 32410:32410/udp \
	-p 32412:32412/udp \
	-p 32413:32413/udp \
	-p 32414:32414/udp \
	-e TZ="America/Los_Angeles" \
	-e PLEX_CLAIM=$CLAIMTOKEN \
	-e ADVERTISE_IP="http://192.168.1.230:32400/" \
	-e PLEX_GID=$GROUPID \
	-e PLEX_UID=$USERID \
	-h DOCKER-PLEX \
	-v $CONFIGDIR:/config \
	-v $TRANSCODEDIR:/transcode \
	-v /mnt/data:/data \
	plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass

Attached is the PMS logs. I didn’t get the Roku logs this time. Restarting the container fixed everything, as usual. I checked in htop and the Plex EAE Service was running.

Mogul345 · December 17, 2017, 7:13pm

@sa2000 said:
With regards to EAE - when you do the streaming that needs EAE for audio - can you see if the directories are actually being written to and files being created by the EAE process

The directory structure would be below
/tmp/pms-7ffc530d-1e2c-446e-8db7-4f33ca8e8ded/EasyAudioEncoder/
eg
/tmp/pms-7ffc530d-1e2c-446e-8db7-4f33ca8e8ded/EasyAudioEncoder/Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)/8abb22c9cb126688832b0734995d6e8a_25754-1-0.wav
This is an example - it may be different subdirectory below EasyAudioEncoder

and is /tmp accessible to the docker process ?

Somehow I missed this post, sorry. I am not binding my host’s /tmp dir to the containers /tmp dir. But I did go into the container and I saw that inside the containers filesystem there is a /tmp dir, and I did see that there were some dirs there for EasyAudioEncoder, following the pattern you mention above. Next time it happens I’ll get into the container again and see if the failing file is really there or not.

UPDATE: It happened again, and this time I went into the container and checked out the filesystem. I can confirm that the directory structure was there, but the .wav file was not. So it’s as if it can’t write the file.

Could this be happening b/c the temporary files are being written inside the container’s filesystem rather than on the host directly?

tcf909 · December 17, 2017, 8:59pm

I had to bind my /tmp to a directory outside of the container to get my eac
to work reliably. Not sure how the overlay filesystem in the container
causes this but confirmed.

Mogul345 · December 19, 2017, 7:01am

After it happened again, I bound /tmp to the same directory I bind /transcode to.

Looking at the plex logs, I wonder why the value for the EAE_ROOT var is set to /tmp in the first place. Why isn’t it in the same directory used for transcoding? And I wonder if we can override that somehow?

sa2000 · December 19, 2017, 12:05pm

@Mogul345 said:
After it happened again, I bound /tmp to the same directory I bind /transcode to.

Looking at the plex logs, I wonder why the value for the EAE_ROOT var is set to /tmp in the first place. Why isn’t it in the same directory used for transcoding? And I wonder if we can override that somehow?

I believe it was set differently for EAE because of relying on iNotify notifications for EAE to work and with /tmp it is more likely that this would be supported

Mogul345 · December 22, 2017, 3:10am

So mounting /tmp to the same transcode directory on my host seems to have helped. I’ve been up 2 days without issue.

Again, I’m a docker newb here. But regardless of this problem, shouldn’t we always being binding /tmp to the transcode directory on the host? Audio files aren’t exactly small, and aren’t you supposed to be writing data in bind points, not in the container filesystem? Why would it make sense to transcode audio in the container, but video outside it?

tcf909 · December 22, 2017, 3:36pm

You are 100% correct. Just doesn’t make sense. I had originally assumed
that eac would honor the transcode directory setting. When I ran in to this
issue and discovered the use of tmp I was a bit baffled. A lot of times we
will bind tmp to a host scratch space with docker (but not by default).

I’m guessing this somehow works for Plex in their Plex cloud use and that’s
why it is this way (but just speculation on my part).

bobbykarate · January 29, 2018, 6:10pm

FWIW: I was having a similar issue with the official PlexMediaServer - unRAID docker.

ERROR - [Transcoder] [eac3_eae @ 0x149f9e0] EAE timeout! EAE not running, or wrong folder? Could not read '/tmp/pms-61b92191-10d4-442c-8e76-fa679ed12790/EasyAudioEncoder/Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)/iqwqc5rj3jdml3mehndz5myo_7489-1-0.wav'

Turns out is was an issue with _execute _ permissions on the EasyAudioEncoder file where my plex appdate resides.

Find EasyAudioEncoder in your Plex directory using a terminal/PuTTY… In my case, the location was:

/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder

Using “ls -lah” command to list contents of directory, I found that EasyAudioEncoder was read/write only (rw-rw-rw-):

root@Maximus:/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder# ls -lah total 2.8M drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ./ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ../ -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody users 2.8M Jan 15 16:45 EasyAudioEncoder

Enter the following command to give the file execute permissions:

chmod 777 EasyAudioEncoder

Permissions now changed to rwxrwxrwx:

root@Maximus:/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder# ls -lah total 2.8M drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ./ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ../ -rwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 2.8M Jan 15 16:45 EasyAudioEncoder

Now everything is working again!! This fix could have been just specific to my situation, so YMMV, but I wanted to share it in case anyone else has been banging their head against a wall like me.

ds412aww · February 4, 2018, 4:51pm

Thanks, this solved my docker issue as well.
My symptoms in case it helps someone else:
playback of certain files (I now assume EAC encoded files) would fail, but only on specific client applications. It would fail on Firefox, Chrome, & Amazon Firestick, but would not fail on a Roku Ultra.

Thanks for the insightful tip.

@bobbykarate said:
FWIW: I was having a similar issue with the official PlexMediaServer - unRAID docker.

ERROR - [Transcoder] [eac3_eae @ 0x149f9e0] EAE timeout! EAE not running, or wrong folder? Could not read '/tmp/pms-61b92191-10d4-442c-8e76-fa679ed12790/EasyAudioEncoder/Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)/iqwqc5rj3jdml3mehndz5myo_7489-1-0.wav'

Turns out is was an issue with _execute _ permissions on the EasyAudioEncoder file where my plex appdate resides.

Find EasyAudioEncoder in your Plex directory using a terminal/PuTTY… In my case, the location was:

/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder

Using “ls -lah” command to list contents of directory, I found that EasyAudioEncoder was read/write only (rw-rw-rw-):

root@Maximus:/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder# ls -lah total 2.8M drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ./ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ../ -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody users 2.8M Jan 15 16:45 EasyAudioEncoder

Enter the following command to give the file execute permissions:

chmod 777 EasyAudioEncoder

Permissions now changed to rwxrwxrwx:

root@Maximus:/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder# ls -lah total 2.8M drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ./ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 32 Jan 15 16:45 ../ -rwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 2.8M Jan 15 16:45 EasyAudioEncoder

Now everything is working again!! This fix could have been just specific to my situation, so YMMV, but I wanted to share it in case anyone else has been banging their head against a wall like me.

nicolastp · February 9, 2018, 9:40am

@bobbykarate said:
chmod 777 EasyAudioEncoder

Linux Plex Media Server (not docker) running Version 1.11.1.4768 and I had the same problem and this worked for me. Thank you!

neis · March 17, 2018, 4:24am

For those running the docker version (official). The directory structure is:
config/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Codecs/EasyAudioEncoder-141-linux-ubuntu-x86_64/EasyAudioEncoder/

TangoMikeOscar · April 27, 2018, 9:43pm

@bobbykarate said:

chmod 777 EasyAudioEncoder

Fixed it for me as well! Huge thanks.

cdp181 · May 5, 2018, 7:24pm

chmod 777 EasyAudioEncoder

Fixed for me, thanks. This happened after I used the permissions tool in unRAID.

lightrush · May 17, 2018, 12:22am

Just happened to me on Ubuntu 16.04 with Docker 18.03.1-ce. I’m pretty sure that inotify isn’t a problem since fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288. EasyAudioEncoder was running and permissions on the executable are fine. I was able to write to /tmp using bash. Chmodding the whole /tmp recursively with 777 did nothing. Finally, I killed the EasyAudioEncoder process and the playback started instantaneously. What could be causing this behaviour? A bug in EasyAudioEncoder? Something on the system that screws up with the process?

lightrush · May 17, 2018, 1:54am

I tried the workaround mentioned here - https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1522345/#Comment_1522345. Will report back with results.

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ERROR - [Transcoder] [ac3_eae @ 0x2fd4f40] EAE timeout! EAE not running, or wrong folder ....

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