Server Version#: 1.18.5.2309
Player Version#: 3.104.2 (PC application)
As it relates to the captioned I have a local connection to the Plex server, I receive an error titled
“Playback Error”, details "An error occurred trying to play “<movie/tv show title>” when I chose to downgrade playback to 4mbits or lower. If I direct play I don’t receive any errors and if I downgrade to 8mbits the movie/tv show plays but might just close after a few minutes.
If I uncheck “Use hardware acceleration when available” in the transcoder section I can downgrade to 4mbits or lower.
If I check “Use hardware acceleration when available” and uncheck “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding” I can downgrade to 4mbits or lower.
“Disable video stream transcoding” is unchecked.
The server is on 192.168.51.0/24 and I am on 192.168.50.0/24
Not meaning to convolute the thread but my friends who access my server with a 4mbit bandwidth limit have prior complains that audio stutters and plex closes playback for which they have to re-enter to view. This happens several times during a 45min episode.
Also, I notice similar but intermittent audio stutter problems when viewing on my iPad where the video is “Directstream” but the audio is transcoded.
Server vitals look good with the CPUs (2 x E5 2650v1) below 40% most times. I am using Windows Server 2016 standard, my GPU is a Nvidia P4000, 64GB RAM. I connect to the storage using window shares connected to a FreeNAS server.
I recently switched off verbose logging so when that trickles through I’ll attach the logs.
After repeating the transcoding issues a few times Windows crashed.
I am testing remotely connected to the server via VPN and while I haven’t encountered any of the audio issues since I disabled hardware encoding (decoding is still on) the show that I’m watching stops randomly and I have to quit and restart the show.
I can confirm that my Plex server, also running v1.18.5.2309 is manifesting the same behavior with the exact same Plex Transcoding settings enabled.
H/W-accelerated transcoding worked perfectly immediately prior to installing the update today.
In my case, I have a pair of AMD Radeon RX-580 video cards as opposed to the OP’s nVidia GPU. My CPU is similar, but a couple of generations newer than the above. Haswell-era Xenon E5 2667 V3. My OS is Win10 Workstation edition.
I’m disappointed to not have seen a reply from a Team Member on this topic or perhaps a sticky post.
@mrbillishere: Thanks for your reply, I have spent countless hours rebuilding, tweaking and reinstalling software trying to solve this issue. I even purchased new hardware as well to run a parallel instance.
I am in the process of testing version 1.14 of Plex and thus far it is working well. I still have the issue with PMP App but all my other devices are functioning properly.
I asked my friends to aid with a stress test, I should have some feedback on that by the weekend.
I actually downloaded the logs in the same manner you described and the zip contains all the requisite files. I didn’t think it was taboo to host the logs on google drive. Perhaps there’s some Plex forum etiquette that I’m missing, I feel as if I’m being scolded.
I understand that a bad encode or a corrupt file will affect the performance of the transcoder. That would mean that all of my files are corrupted and @mrbillishere’s as well. It would also mean that the files are miraculously restored using 1.14. If this is the issue there should be some warning or error in the logs, could you give me a 2nd opinion on that?
I noticed that in 1.14 there doesn’t seem to be any HW decoding only HW encoding where as 1.18 does both by default. Could this be the source of the issue or just a misrepresentation in Tautulli?
no its not a scolding, more like general internet caution about clicking links to random dropboxes etc, and advising that you don’t need to link hosted files, you can attach/drag/drop into the forum reply to upload zipped logs and screenshots etc.
plex recently updated the transcoder, I think starting 1.15 is the new transcoder and has gone through multiple updates/fixes since then.
that is why HW decoding started working with the new versions.
Along with this new functionality and continued work from plex on the hw transcoder, it has highlighted various examples of corrupted or badly encoded files, that were not previously problematic under the old transcoder.
in simple terms, the new hw transcoder can be more picky/sensitive about files than the old one.
not everyone encodes their own files, too many people download random junk from the internet and expect it to magically work on anything/everything they want to play it on.
I have a few of my own files that are/were poorly encoded.
My point was for you to check/compare to the other thread to see if your files were similar (ie extremely high qty of ‘reference frames’), as that could be something related, or not, to the problems you are having.
mrbill has completely different hardware, so if you both are having the same/similar issue, then it would good to know if your files are similarly encoded, along with the logs from mrbill.
Your problems could be completely unrelated but show similar behavior.
Thanks for the info re: the new transcoder. It would explain why using an older version helps. I suppose all of this feedback will aid the Plex developers tweak their HW encoding thresholds.
The best advice I can give anyone reading this thread would be to download an earlier version for me 1.14.1.5488 works (so-far).
I can’t say for certain, I started experiencing the issues in December 2019 but it mostly affected my colleagues accessing the system externally as they were the ones using transcoded streams.
Once I can find a copy of 1.18.2 I will test it on a separate installation.
While I use Plex casually, I think implementing change management procedures is advised.
I have the installer for PlexMediaServer-1.18.2.2058-e67a4e892-x86 and I see that it is dated in late November before any issues manifested. I’ll give this a try and revert to the thread accordingly.
Alrighty. I re-enabled h/w transcoding support and verbose logging. Then I repro’d the issue several times using a couple different sources include one recorded using Plex-DVR in the hope that you can’t get any easier than that. Note that in my case the desired quality setting (e.g. 4Mbps 720p vs 8Mbps 1080p) doesn’t matter. None work when I enable hw-accelerated encoding/decoding in the Transcoding menu. Upon re-reading the OP’s original post I thought I better explain this difference.
With respect to transcoder-pickiness… that discussion is getting above my pay grade, but I can say this - I used the Optimize function to create a freshly-encoded 8Mbps, 1080p copy. I then use Play Version to view that source. Direct Play is perfect as usual. I then changed the quality settings to 4Mbps, 720p and witnessed the h/w-based transcoder fail to properly launch. (Same as all of the above.) So to me, that’s the closest I can get to a test run where transcoder-pickiness is factored out – I mean, the Plex encoder created the source I told it to transcode. Make sense?
Again, in my case this all worked perfectly using Plex Server for Windows version 1.18.4.2171 earlier today. Then I happened to notice the new version advertisement on the General tab and thought, why not? Just another update.
I read about how to essentially roll back to an older version so after I triple-back-up everything I think I’ll take that route.
Unfortunately I’ve been repro-ing stuff for Microsoft a lot lately and they want ultra-level debugging enables so I just assumed the same applies here.
I am testing remotely with < 4 other persons online with me at the moment.
While watching a video my Plex app (android) stops playback, it doesn’t crash but it just sticks on a frame and doesn’t move. The Plex server represents my stream as being paused even though I didn’t pause.
Please find logs to support same attached, the event took place at around 10:00AM
I found this in the logs
Jan 31, 2020 10:08:26.031 [13696] WARN - Overzealous client asked for end range of 1310719, content size is 737524; we’ll clip.
Jan 31, 2020 10:08:26.031 [13696] WARN - Range could not be satisfied 983040 - 737523 (total size=737524)
I updated my nvidia drivers ensuring that I used the Windows Server 2016 version and I haven’t received a crash as yet.
PMP also transcodes down to 4mbits without issue.
Negatives
It appears that since the upgrade of driver Plex is software decoding all of my media files and using hardware for encoding
Due to the above my CPU util is going into the 60-80% region with about 12 concurrent transcoded streams
I believe as a result of the above some audio stuttering is occuring. It is very minor as compared to previous.
Once I can get my videocard to aid with decoding as well as encoding I should be good to go. Unless the issue originated with HW decoding in the first place…
