help: roku 3 intermittent error, "unable to play this audio item"

General Discussions
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I’m looking for some pointers on troubleshooting this error. When I stream music to my roku3, every so often I’ll be interrupted with this error and have to start over: “We’re unable to play this audio item, make sure the server is running and has access to this audio item.” clicking OK sends me back to the plex menus; sometimes showing no content. I can usually hit back a couple times to get someplace and then click into where I was. But sometimes I have to kill the plex app (roku “home” button) and relaunch.

Tips? How do I figure out where the error is? I’m streaming all day long to the web client, and I have consistently checked the access from the PMS machine. So I’m thinking it’s a bug or other error in the roku plex app.

Oh, and to be more precise, this happens within about 5 or 10 songs from hitting “play”. I’ve been playing a whole artist with about 10 albums, usually on shuffle. Sometimes two songs in, sometimes 10-ish, I get the error. This has been happening for the last week or two. I tried rebuilding the PMS host on docker, moving it to a new OS, and re-adding the library.

I recall now that this started not long after creating a second user on my server and setting a PIN. Which I had never done before. Unlikely to be related but just in case.

My idiosyncrasies:

  • PMS (latest plex pass build) running in Docker (official plex docker image) on Photon OS (linux) on VMWare ESXi 6.0
  • Media on Synology DSM 6.0 - mounted via CIFS from the linux host and mapped via -v inside docker
  • All hardwired on the same layer2 broadcast domain, same layer3 subnet

Thanks in advance,
//klaxoff

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…merged above; not sure how to delete this comment

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…and now the thread shows “answered” because I replied to myself? crap. I’ll start a new one.

4

…nope, I don’t need to start a new one, just add a new commend and say “no, not answered”. So, please, still need help. :slight_smile:

5

Attaching PMS logs. Thanks again, in advance. //klaxoff

6

more troubleshooting; I found the exact same error on my roku stick (1st gen) and my roku 3. And the errors occurred at the exact same time. Meanwhile, RasPlex (on Pi3) ran without a hiccup. I’m thinking there’s something weird with either the roku plex client app or with PMS (but only affecting roku). Very strange.

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Fixed. Turns out there are lots of significant bugs in build 1.4.3. I rolled back to the 1.3.4 docker image (plexinc/pms-docker:1.3.4.3285-b46e0ea) and it’s all going swimmingly.

I’ll record some of my troubleshooting steps for future civilizations. I backed up and restored my database into a clean install of PMS, re-added libraries and everything, and was still getting errors. I also was concerned that maybe mount.cifs was slow to my Synology DS1815+, but I was able to isolate that using sftp over the linux host (it ran really fast there, no seek lag or anything). Once I read the bug reports on 1.4.3, I rolled back to my previous PMS install, database, etc. and docker build 1.3.4 - and it all ran like a champ.

Disappointed in the QA for the 1.4.3 release, but I still love you guys. Will wait till the next release before I switch back to :plexpass.