Goodbye and thanks for all the fish

General Discussions
1

So the new UI came, and it forced me to finger my remote more times than a lady of the night to get to where I wanted to go. I was miffed, so I decided to accept it and carry on. Then, while watching a series, I proceeded to the next episode, and now it failed to play. I went to the web version and got an error Conversion failed. A required codec could not be found or failed to install. I tried a few things (permissions on TrueNAS scale, deleting the Codec folder, restarting the app on the Roku box, and a few other things), and still the same issue. I reverted to a previous version, and the same issue occurred. I installed Jellyfin, and it works.

I don’t want to spend a whole day figuring out why it won’t work, so I decided to say goodbye and thanks for all the fish…

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2

After reading your post, there are a couple of things I’m unclear about.

First, you mentioned that you’ve already got Jellyfin up and running. That’s fine, but since you also made a post here in the Plex forums, it seems like maybe you aren’t completely done with Plex. And I get that — you give up a ton of features when you switch. In my case, the most important is the lack of 3rd‑party support (for example, TV manufacturers offering a native Plex app but not a Jellyfin one).

Second, it’s not clear if you’re tying the new Roku interface to the playback error you saw. The UI changes are one thing (and I understand not liking them), but the codec failure you described points to a server‑side issue that would have surfaced regardless of the Roku update. The Roku app is just a client — it can’t corrupt or reconfigure your Plex Media Server. What it can do is request a format the server isn’t ready to deliver, which exposes weaknesses already present on the server side. Assuming that you haven’t completely given up on Plex, here are a couple of things that might help you resolve the issue.

Since you’ve already restarted the server and cleared the codec folder, the one remaining issue that often causes this error is that the server can’t reach Plex’s codec servers to download what it needs. On a TrueNAS system (especially if you’re running it on repurposed hardware), it’s worth confirming that the jail/container running Plex has full outbound internet access.

Here are a couple of ways to check that:

  1. Open a shell into your Plex jail in TrueNAS and run a simple connectivity test, for example: ping plex.tv curl -I HTTPS:\downloads.plex.tv. If those fail, Plex won’t be able to fetch codecs.
  2. Make sure your firewall or router isn’t blocking outbound HTTPS requests from the Plex jail.
  3. Confirm that the user running Plex inside the jail has permission to write to the Codecs directory (since Plex downloads them as .tmp files and then renames them into place).

If those checks pass, the next step is to look at your Plex Media Server logs right after the failure. They’ll usually show whether the codec download was attempted and why it failed (e.g., timeout, permissions, or rename error).

In short: the Roku app didn’t cause the failure — it just surfaced it. The troubleshooting path is confirming that your Plex jail on TrueNAS can reach Plex’s codec servers and has permission to install what it downloads. That’s the piece that will tell you whether this is a one‑off hiccup or a configuration issue on the server side.

1 Like
4

I have tested the connection using CURL: curl -I https://plex.tv and it connects to plext.tv with a 302 (found), but when I try https://downloads.plex.tv, it has a 301 resule (moved). I can ping Google from within the NAS.

Yes, I will be losing some functionality, and it is not the ROKU stick as the issue persists on my PC/Laptops. But I am frustrated that it broke somehow when nothing was updated.

I moved my transcode folder to an accessible SSD on my NAS, and these are the errors from the log file when I try to play something.

Sep 26, 2025 17:15:38.744 [140033550064440] INFO - [Req#cff/Transcode] CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'hevc'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:38.827 [140033599572792] ERROR - [Req#cff/Transcode] Codecs: Download failed: safe_fopen("/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/libhevc_decoder.so.tmp-e898-48c0-8c43-0b09.pms_dld-d748-fc95-a564-1d2f"): No such file or directory
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:38.827 [140033550064440] ERROR - [Req#cff/Transcode] Error configuring transcoder: Decoder install failed: hevc
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.835 [140033550064440] WARN - [Req#d08/Transcode] Denying access to transcode of key /library/metadata/10010 due to terminated session
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.903 [140033576106808] INFO - [Req#d13/Transcode] CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'hevc'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.975 [140033599572792] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] Codecs: Download failed: safe_fopen("/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/libhevc_decoder.so.tmp-9fdd-c605-02cb-c9cf.pms_dld-7e59-6c22-dadb-864b"): No such file or directory
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.975 [140033576106808] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Could not open directory '/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.976 [140033576106808] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Failed to initialise VAAPI connection: -1 (unknown libva error).
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:39.978 [140033576106808] INFO - [Req#d13/Transcode] CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'hevc'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.043 [140033599572792] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] Codecs: Download failed: safe_fopen("/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/libhevc_decoder.so.tmp-0b0d-a5bb-3c40-3c2b.pms_dld-b2b9-227b-f83a-bcaf"): No such file or directory
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.043 [140033576106808] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Could not open directory '/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.045 [140033576106808] ERROR - [Req#d13/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Failed to initialise VAAPI connection: -1 (unknown libva error).
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.163 [140033597406008] INFO - [Req#d27/Transcode] CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'hevc'
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.224 [140033599572792] ERROR - [Req#d27/Transcode] Codecs: Download failed: safe_fopen("/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs/cf7e611-580b18dbc1ce38ef1c15aaf8-linux-x86_64/libhevc_decoder.so.tmp-047f-9dde-9cd2-1e8b.pms_dld-d9fe-3bcd-2332-0c69"): No such file or directory
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:40.224 [140033597406008] ERROR - [Req#d27/Transcode] Error configuring transcoder: Decoder install failed: hevc
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.213 [140033597406008] WARN - [Req#d30/Transcode] Denying access to transcode of key /library/metadata/10010 due to terminated session
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.322 [140033550064440] WARN - [Req#cf4] QueryParser: Invalid field 'contentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.322 [140033550064440] WARN - [Req#cf4] QueryParser: Invalid field 'pinnedContentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.324 [140033597406008] WARN - [Req#cf5] QueryParser: Invalid field 'sectionID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.324 [140033597406008] WARN - [Req#cf5] QueryParser: Invalid field 'contentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.324 [140033597406008] WARN - [Req#cf5] QueryParser: Invalid field 'pinnedContentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:41.503 [140033597406008] WARN - [Req#cf5] SLOW QUERY: It took 380.000000 ms to retrieve 50 items.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:46.324 [140033552173880] WARN - [Req#d6b] QueryParser: Invalid field 'contentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.
Sep 26, 2025 17:15:46.324 [140033552173880] WARN - [Req#d6b] QueryParser: Invalid field 'pinnedContentDirectoryID' found, ignoring.

Plex was created with administrator rights which has root previlages, so it can’t be that.

6

Okay, I’m not sure what happened. I went into the Codec’s folder, renamed the EasyAudioEncoder-xxxx-linux-x86_64.tmp file to EasyAudioEncoder-xxxx-linux-x86_64, and then restarted the Plex app in TrueNAS. Now it works. I also renamed the Cache folder to old and the one in \Plex\Library\Application Support\Plex Media Server\Plug-in Support\Caches to OldCaches. So, not sure if that helped. But frustrated that I had to go through all of this when it stopped playing mid-series.

Just FYI, I asked AI to assist, and it told me to rename the codec folder.