Help us help you - how to provide logs to get your problems identified and hopefully resolved

General Discussions
1

If you have a problem, if no else can help, and you can find them, maybe you can hire
The A-Team.

Just kidding… but especially if you can reproduce your issue effectively, please capture the logs and attach or drag/drop them into your post.

Complaining or talking in generalities doesn’t really help you get your problems solved. Be sure to provide specific details, including exact client and server plex versions (It DOES matter), what kind of server hardware (gpu/cpu/ram/storage/etc), is the server running on bare metal, virtualized, or in a container, network (wifi or wired), tv or device model.

If your problem is about content/metadata matching, please provide EXACT path and filenames used. 99% of any metadata issues are caused by poor or incorrect naming. See also

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/

Most of the time server logs will tell the story.
Sometimes its a client issue, so only client logs help;
sometimes both the client/server logs have to be compared together.

One of the first things you can do to help identify and potentially resolve/work around and issue, is monitoring the plex dashboard Plex Web > settings > dashboard

This will show you information on the stream, if it’s transcoding etc.

In order to help you figure out the problem, we need some clean logs from during when the problem occurs.

Plex Web

image

  • restart plex server (so startup logs are included)
  • wait ~2–3 minutes for server to settle
  • play a video that you are having problem with
  • if it plays, let it play about 60 seconds, then stop it
  • wait ~30 seconds after stopping
  • go to Plex Web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs
  • drag/drop the whole zip into a reply

That should get us started. But if that doesn’t help to figure it out, then we may also need the client logs.

client log info
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201869908-log-files/

server log info
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250417-plex-media-server-log-files/

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