Since today, I’ve been facing major issues with Plex hardware transcoding.
It almost doesn’t work anymore… almost because it works about 1 in 10 attempts, and the other 9 times it only plays 10–15 seconds of a movie/series before stopping entirely.
Here are my details:
OS: Debian 12 (Kernel 6.8.12-5)
Plex version: 1.41.3.9314 (latest)
NVIDIA driver: 560.35.03 (latest)
A few months ago, everything was working fine (though I haven’t used it much recently). Manual transcoding works flawlessly (tested with FFMPEG, NVENC, and NVDECODE—I’m able to convert 4K HEVC videos without issues using my GTX 1050).
My hardware:
Intel i5-8300H
GTX 1050
64 GB RAM
Plex running bare-metal
I strongly suspect this is a Plex bug since the issue started right after my updates today. I’ve tried rolling back the kernel (6.1, 6.5, and 6.8) and the NVIDIA drivers (535, 550, and 560), but nothing changed.
In the logs, I consistently see the following error (with no additional details, even with verbose logging enabled):
Jobs: '/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder' exit code for process 125755 is -9 (signal: Killed)
Does anyone have an idea of what could be going on? This is really frustrating.
I don’t have the specific version of libnvidia-encode and libnvidia-decode, but they come from my installation of the proprietary nvidia driver (560), so I think it’s the same version.
I have both entered in /dev/dri, and plex is a member of the video and render groups.
I rebooted again, no better, but what I find strange, as I said earlier, is that transcoding runs for 5 seconds and preloads me for like 20 seconds, and works fine with FFMPEG in manual mode :/.
ok, I’ve tried my distribution’s drivers, and it’s worse.
I get a segfault when I try to transcode, which kills PMS, and same for other software (like FFMPEG), so I’m going to look for another version to see what’s going on :/.
I’ll test other driver combinations, and if it persists I’ll try roll-back my version of Plex to see …
apart from version 525 (obviously buggy on my system …) I have the same behavior with drivers 550 and 560.
I’ve also tested kernel roll-back (6.5.13 being the oldest I have, and functional during my initial installation).
I’m able to transcode well outside PLEX (with FFMPEG for exemple), I’ve also tested with the “plex” user to check permission, I can transcode with CUDA, NVENC and NVDEC.
I’ve also roll-back my PMS… version to 1.32.8 (old version).
so I have the .run driver that worked before, the kernel version that went with it, and the know good PMS version, these 3 versions are exactly what I tested and validated some time ago … and it doesn’t work …
what’s frustrating is that it often manages to transcode for several seconds (even more than a minute like now), so PMS actually manages to use the card for a while … but I don’t understand why it suddenly stops afterwards …
I’m a bit out of ideas, and I really don’t want to reinstall the OS (it’s a LAB hypervisor, and I’ve got 8 TB of VMs and containers on it … not critical because it’s a lab and it’s Sunday, but it’s not possible to reinstall…)
PS : I’ve tried running plex as root, to see if it’s a permission problem, same problem … I’ve really run out of ideas
[chuck@lizum Downloads.2008]$ dpkg -l | grep plexm
ii plexmediaserver 1.41.3.9232-434341a9d amd64 Plex organizes all of your personal media so you can easily access and enjoy it.
[chuck@lizum Downloads.2009]$
Hello, I’m having this same issue, and after looking at the /Dev/DRI and DRM nodes, I’ve found what looks like left over unused nodes? maybe from the driver and libraries being updated? I used sudo ubuntu-drivers --gpgpu install to install the drivers and libraries, currently on 570 for everything. Would running that deb file still fix things for me?
got another update. Tried following the steps… found the Driver folder was already empty, and running the Deb file gives an error:
./plexmediaserver_1.41.3.9232-434341a9d_amd64.deb: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
./plexmediaserver_1.41.3.9232-434341a9d_amd64.deb: line 1: `!<arch>'
I’m running Ubuntu 22 kernel 5.15.0
plex version is 1.41.4.9399
Nvidia Driver 570
I can get things to play with direct stream, but only plays for about 5 seconds after changing to any transcoding quality, with any kind of video, combinations of H265/H264 and MKV/MP4, using an RTX A2000, same as you I believe ChuckPa. Running videos separately works fine
Apologies. and thank you for the assistance. I ran the downgrade successfully, and now I’m getting an error for [Req#12be/Transcode] Denying access due to session lacking permission to transcode key /library/metadata/2196 and, after looking into your previous posts and solutions on the subject, I looked into permissions for the folder, and files. When checking, I found the whole Metadata folder missing… somehow… at least I expect its under /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/metadata? well anyway, I ran the scan files, metadata refresh, and analyze, then tried it again and it just got stuck loading, for like 5 minutes, before giving a new FFMPEG error: [Req#6a281/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - cu->cuInit(0) failed[Req#6a281/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - -> CUDA_ERROR_UNKNOWN: unknown error looked into that… found there was two cuda folders under usr/local, but before I changed anything… it just started working? this has been a weird one. Thank you for all the help though, hopefully it keeps working. I bet this was caused by me hitting too close to maxing out the storage space, I might rebuild to a new system if it happens again.
Seeing singular statements in isolation isn’t possible to diagnose
It does sound like you have a permissions problem in /var/lib/plexmediaserver
it’s usually easy to fix what’s missing without resorting to a approach
If you use the default server installation (where ‘plex’ is the runtime user)
then you can remedy any permission problems in three (3) steps
( with plex stopped )
sudo chown -R plex:plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver
sudo find /var/lib/plexmediaserver -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \'
sudo find /var/lib/plexmediaserver -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
I suggest running these 3 commands, starting plex, then Refresh Metadata for all sections in your library.
This will fetch fresh metadata and write the missing structures.
After that’s done, We can take steps to clean up what happened before.
Thank you for the additional info, however, I apologize but I don’t think they will be any use anymore, after checking, the logs are only going back to about 10 hours ago, a few hours after I fixed things.
Please consider getting your nvidia package versions in sync if/when you can.
Even I have a stray older “535” package in there but otherwise all are 565.
[chuck@lizum ~.2007]$ dpkg -l | grep nvidia
ii libnvidia-cfg1-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA binary OpenGL/GLX configuration library
ii libnvidia-common-565 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 all Shared files used by the NVIDIA libraries
rc libnvidia-compute-535:amd64 535.183.01-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA libcompute package
ii libnvidia-compute-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA libcompute package
ii libnvidia-decode-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA Video Decoding runtime libraries
ii libnvidia-egl-wayland1:amd64 1:1.1.15-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 Wayland EGL External Platform library -- shared library
ii libnvidia-encode-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVENC Video Encoding runtime library
ii libnvidia-extra-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 Extra libraries for the NVIDIA driver
ii libnvidia-fbc1-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA OpenGL-based Framebuffer Capture runtime library
ii libnvidia-gl-565:amd64 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES GLVND libraries and Vulkan ICD
ii nvidia-compute-utils-565 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA compute utilities
ii nvidia-dkms-565-open 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA DKMS package (open kernel module)
ii nvidia-driver-565-open 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA driver (open kernel) metapackage
ii nvidia-firmware-565-565.77 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 Firmware files used by the kernel module
ii nvidia-kernel-common-565 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 Shared files used with the kernel module
ii nvidia-kernel-source-565-open 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA kernel source package
ii nvidia-prime 0.8.17.1 all Tools to enable NVIDIA's Prime
ii nvidia-settings 510.47.03-0ubuntu1 amd64 Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ii nvidia-utils-565 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA driver support binaries
ii screen-resolution-extra 0.18.2 all Extension for the nvidia-settings control panel
ii xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-565 565.77-0ubuntu0~gpu22.04.1 amd64 NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
[chuck@lizum ~.2008]$
approach 
