I noticed a few weeks ago that despite always having had Generate Voice Activity enabled, not a single file in any of my libraries had Has Voice Activity true when viewing the file info. I manually ran a few and they all got the Has Voice Activity true designation with no problem.
I then double checked all of my settings and confirmed them. In all of the individual libraries Enable voice activity detection is enabled. In Settings → Library Generate voice activity data is set to as a scheduled task. In Settings → Scheduled Tasks they’re set to run from 1am to 7am and every option is checked and enabled except Update all libraries during maintenance.
After than I ran it manually on every library and successfully got Has Voice Activity true on all of my files.
It’s been two weeks since then and not a single new TV show or movie that I’ve added to any of my libraries has had the voice activity generated automatically by the scheduled task, which leads me to think that there’s either something wrong or a setting I’m missing.
Good question. Intros and Credits detection work fine. I have those set to run as a scheduled task the same as generating voice activity. None of them are set to when media is added, so the results should be the same.
Looking at the logs there’s a Plex Media Scanner Voice Activity.log for every day for the last 10 days. The logs are short, and I don’t see any obvious errors, but they all look like this FWIW:
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.001 [9968] INFO - Plex Media Scanner v1.41.6.9685-d301f511a - ASRock Z790 Pro RS x64-x64 - build: windows-x86_64 - GMT -07:00
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.001 [9968] INFO - Windows version: 10.0 (Build 19045), language en-US
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.001 [9968] INFO - 20 3610 MHz processor(s): Architecture=9, Level=6, Revision=38658 Processor Identifier=Intel64 Family 6 Model 151 Stepping 2, GenuineIntel
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.001 [9968] DEBUG - "C:\Program Files\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Media Scanner.exe" --voice-activity-detection --files "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Detection\cb588117-59ed-44c4-a833-2c2ab8ff9e50" --log-file-suffix " Voice Activity"
May 12, 2025 04:58:01.996 [13616] DEBUG - Opening 20 database sessions to library (com.plexapp.plugins.library), SQLite 3.39.4, threadsafe=1
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.051 [13616] DEBUG - [MI] Opening input file: "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Detection\cb588117-59ed-44c4-a833-2c2ab8ff9e50"
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.051 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Opening 'C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Detection\cb588117-59ed-44c4-a833-2c2ab8ff9e50' for reading
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.051 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Setting default whitelist 'file,crypto,data'
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.051 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format flac probed with size=2048 and score=100
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.051 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Before avformat_find_stream_info() pos: 8288 bytes read:32768 seeks:0 nb_streams:1
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.052 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - All info found
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.052 [13616] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - After avformat_find_stream_info() pos: 15456 bytes read:32768 seeks:0 frames:1
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.053 [13616] DEBUG - [VoiceActivityScanner] [FFMPEG] - Using fltp internally between filters
May 12, 2025 04:58:02.053 [13616] DEBUG - [VoiceActivityScanner] [FFMPEG] - first_dts 0 not matching first dts 1152 (pts 1152, duration 576) in the queue
May 12, 2025 04:58:06.383 [13616] DEBUG - [MI] Closing input file: "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Detection\cb588117-59ed-44c4-a833-2c2ab8ff9e50"
Maybe I’m misinterpreting that change log, but it says “Scheduled tasks could try to run items which have already been processed”, but these files haven’t had any voice activity generated at all.
To test I’ve just been looking at new files, and none of them have voice activity unless I run them manually, the same as before. For example, shows and movies I added a week ago still have no voice activity, even though all of the other scanning from scheduled tasks has run successfully (intros, credits, etc).
I’ve only just the other day upgraded to the current PMS to avoid the previous database size issue, but scheduled tasks have since run and nothing generated voice activity so far as I can tell. Perhaps I just need to wait longer, but I would have thought it would have generated the missing voice activity the first time it ran. I’ve PM’d you new logs from the last couple of days. If you would like me to do anything like shut the server down and restart it to grab fresh logs, or grab logs by a certain time period, let me know. Thanks.
I need to recheck the exact words but I believe you can search for the word butler. There should be a start/starting and ended/finished lines. Check your scheduled tasks time and see if the start time matches. Then check the finished time, if that matches, it may not have finished in time. If this is the case, change the time to give your server more time.
There actually is one weird thing that seems related. The only file it shows it scanning is a very old single episode of a TV show that’s been on my server for a long time, probably nearly as long as I’ve had Plex. So that makes me think maybe it’s just getting caught on that one file and then it gives up.
I just played the file, and checked it with ffprobe and it seems fine. I PM’d you the snippet of the log where it tries to detect voice activity on that file. Maybe that file is just problematic and if I delete it the scanner can progress.
Yup. Looks like it’s running into some odd error related to the video. Not sure why that should stop scanning the audio. Guessing just something that was unexpected. Try removing that file and see what happens. I also suggest providing a copy of the snippet and the entire log to @BigWheel so he can pass it along to the devs to look at.
All right, I sent that to him. I also removed that file from the library, rescanned it, and emptied trash to clear it in case it gets stuck somehow trying to find it. I’ll check the log tomorrow and see if it manages to progress and analyze any files. Thanks for the advice.
Your log show there are 3843 items that need to be analyzed. If that isn’t all your videos then your server did scan some in the past before encountering that file.
I ran all of the libraries manually when I originally noticed it wasn’t scanning. Since then, no more items have been scanned that I haven’t analyzed by hand. To clarify, if I run any of the new files by hand they will generate voice activity, it’s only the automated scheduled task that isn’t working.
Reading through the log, it ran again last night, but only over the same season of the same show, and didn’t add voice activity to anything else. Nothing new other than possibly that show got any voice activity. I’m going to PM you that log as well, and I’m also just going to remove that entire season of the show and see if anything changes tonight.
Update: The Bulter ran ButlerTaskGenerateVoiceActivity, scanned a file, but didn’t update anything with voice activity including the file it scanned. I’m sending you both the log where the task starts and ends with nothing being generated.
