[FIXED] "Playback Error: This live TV session has ended". "There was a transcode error"

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
Plex Version#: 1.20.1.3252-a78fef9a9

Hopefully this will help others google to an answer faster that I did, because it was hard to track down these answers in the plex forums. I had to piece most of it together myself.

I got a sequence of errors when trying to get Plex DRV working for the first time and the errors were far from useful…

[ERROR] Playback Error: This live TV session has ended.

This could happen for a lot of reasons. But what I’ve turned up is most common:

  • Your tuner needs a firmware upgrade
  • Your connection between the tuner and plex isn’t stable/fast enough
  • Your linux user doesn’t have write permissions to your recordings Library path
  • For me it was because my /var/lib/plexmediaserver database was out of space

[ERROR] There was a transcode error.

Upon looking into the logs I saw one error among others that stood out: [Transcoder] Unknown decoder 'mpeg2video'. After some researching I figured out that:

  • This can sometimes be due to your linux user not having the correct write permissions
  • I needed to move the Settings => Manage => Transcoder => Transcoder temporary directory to a folder that was NOT a network drive; it sounds like you can run into performance problems too easily
  • And probably more importantly I had to switch to a drive without the noexec flag. I keep all my media files on a noexec drive, and it turns out adding plex tmp (for transcoding) on the same drive was a bad idea.

I hope this helps!

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