HTPC Stops Playlist After 1-2 Episodes

Plex Players Desktop Players
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1

Server Version#: 1.40.2.8312
Player Version#: v1.58.0.106-d213ced1

I have a playlist I use as background noise, to watch mindlessly/etc, basically my “TV” substitute.

I’ve had trouble with each plex player for differing reasons, but more to the point of this topic the Plex HTPC seemed like the perfect fit for my needs until I actually used it. For some reason, after one or two items in the playlist play, the player just… stops and waits for me to select play/shuffle/etc.

Auto Play Countdown Time - This is set to “Immediate” (I have plex pass).

Passout Protection - This is set to “Never Prompt”

These are the only two settings (HTPC specific) I believe may have any relation to the issue. I have tried fiddling with them with no change in results.

2

Please fetch the HTPC log after such an occurrence.

3

Plex HTPC.log (482.2 KB)

Attached is the latest log from when the error occurred.

4

Do you have a joystick/game controller connected to the machine?
Or some sort of IR remote control receiver?

Here is something to try:
Enter the Windows device manager and edit the properties of the network adapter.
Disable “Windows can switch off the device to save energy”.
If the network adapter has an advanced configuration tab, see if it supports changing the link speed when idle. Disable that as well.

Do this both on the machine with Plex HTPC and the Plex server itself.

5

Do you have a joystick/game controller connected to the machine?
Or some sort of IR remote control receiver?

I have 4 external hard drives attached via usb, along side a Wifi adapter (also usb). There is also a program running called “unified remote” which I use to remote control the pc via mobile

I went into the settings and disabled the power management for both the USB device and the internal network card just in case. The server and the machine running HTPC are the same, so only had to do it once.

So far it seems to have worked (played the second episode in the list), but will report back after more attempts.

6

If you can, monitor the platter spin up state of these drives.
Some external hard drives (particularly those advertised as “mobile” and “power efficient”) are very agressively spinning down their platters when idle. (which often means that they are not respecting any power management settings of the Operating System which could say otherwise)

Now picture this situation: you have just played an episode of ~20 minutes that isn’t very large. (Because it is either DVD or compressed Bluray resolution).
Which means that the player has finished fetching all the data already several minutes ago. (the players on desktop PC have a very large network buffer).
This means to the server that there was no significant data transfer for several minutes.
Now the hard drive where the next episode in line is stored on has spun down because it didn’t have anything to do.
If the player has finished playing the previous episode, it will request the next one from the server. It expects a quick(-ish) reaction.
However the server cannot oblige, because it has to wait for the hard drive to spin up before it can deliver any data.

It may be this waiting time which causes the player to give up on the attempt to play the next episode.

And it is a hard nut to crack. There is no communication between an app and the operating system, which could give a hint at what file is going to be requested in the near future. If that were possible, such misdirected decisions of when to suspend a device could be avoided.

For now, all I can recommend is to avoid using external hard drives for a Plex server.

7

The problem is this issue occurs only on HTPC.

I can run Plex in the Windows App, and this issue doesn’t occur (but I have other annoyances w/ that one), and I can run Plex in a browser (which again, have annoyances with). I wanted to switch to HTPC because it advertised a solution to all my issues in one neat little package, only for it to have a third, different set of issues.

8

I’ve asked the devs aboutyour logs and they all say there is nothing that stands out. The Stop command must come from your machine or its periphery.

9

So how can I figure out what’s causing this “stop” command.

As it only happens in Plex HTPC. I even tried downloading both versions of HTPC (the one on windows app store and the non-app store). Both do the exact same thing.

It’s always a single episode of the playlist unless I go in and scrub through the video (i.e jump from 00:00 to the end), then it can play a second one.

I also tried changing the settings in HTPC to have a 5 second delay between episodes, instead of immediately playing (though the web clients’ delay is 10), and it never actually got to that stage. It immediately stops after the first episode in the playlist. I also tried changing the passout protection from never to 3 hours, which didn’t help.

10

Plex HTPC is the only app that has support for regular remote controls. (at least on a PC/Mac)
I’d investigate in this direction.

11

I stopped all external programs outside ones needed (i.e plex media server), and even unplugged the keyboard after starting the playlist. It still stopped after a single episode.

I then went into the HTPC settings and clicked the “Reset App” button, it froze after doing the launch animation, I restarted. Went into plex web and removed the sign in from the authorized devices, then re-logged into HTPC. Started the playlist, everything was running fine.

Made changes to the settings, and immediately it broke.

So now I’m going through the settings, enabling one at a time, to see what’s causing it or if it’s a combination of them.

Default Settings - Works
Auto Play Countdown Time (Immediate) - Works
Skip Intros (Automatic) - Works
Skip Commercials (Automatic) - Works
Skip Credits (Automatic) - Stopped playing as soon as it skipped credits on first episode.
Passout Protection (Never Prompt) - Works

So it looks like I’ve found the culprit, Automatic Skip Credits. Now I don’t know if it’s because of just that setting, or a combination of the aforementioned settings (minus passout protection as that was still on default).

12

Could you determine whether the episodes actually had credits detected?
You can see that when inspecting the media info XML of each episode.

If there are credits, please determine also if some of the episodes have only one or several credit blocks.

You can find them below the cast list, and it would look like this:

<Marker final="1" id="333020" type="credits" startTimeOffset="3232684" endTimeOffset="3411872">
<Attributes id="333020" version="4"/>
</Marker>
13

I saw an episode was rolling credits and got curious, so I clicked the “Skip Credits” button manually. Bam, playlist stopped. I did this on two separate episodes. It seems to work every time.

Looking at the XML file (for the first EP), there is only one marker for the credits, and one marker for the intro.
Attached is the XML file (as a .txt since .xml isn’t allowed).
6738.txt (4.0 KB)

14

Has there been any update on this?

I’ve noticed there’s been a couple HTPC updates but they’ve failed to address this issue.

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