I think I have a permissions problem in Plex "Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error."

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#: Open Media Vault 5.1
Player Version#: Plex 4.12.3

I couldn’t find the Plex logs so I’m not providing them at the moment.

I have the following configuration:
Hardware: Raspberry Pi4
OS: OpenMediaVault (OMV) 5.1 for Arm (SSH into OS works fine)
OMV ‘Extras’: Docker and Portainer

PROBLEM:
All of my movies are in a share folder “…media/movies”. Some of the movies play fine through Plex in the browser using the “192.168.#.#” URL. However, some of them do not play, but instead Plex displays the error “Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.”

I read a few forum responses that suggested it might be the audio codec so I did check the audio codec for the files that won’t play. It appears (from my sample of 75) that the “AC3” is a commonality for each movie that fails. However, I also read that it could be a simple “trasnscode location permissions problem”. I really don’t want to have my PC running for hours to re-encode the files to “AAC” (which is the audio codec for the movies that actually play in Plex) if I have a permissions issues that can be fixed in a few minutes.

QUESTION:
Can someone help me confirm that Plex’s permissions to the ‘transcode’ file/folder/share are correct?

Portainer Plex Log Start

[cont-init.d] 10-adduser: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 40-chown-files: executing…
[cont-init.d] 40-chown-files: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 45-plex-claim: executing…
[cont-init.d] 45-plex-claim: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 50-gid-video: executing…
[cont-init.d] 50-gid-video: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 60-plex-update: executing…
Docker is used for versioning skip update check
[cont-init.d] 60-plex-update: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 99-custom-scripts: executing…
[custom-init] no custom files found exiting…
[cont-init.d] 99-custom-scripts: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] done.
[services.d] starting services
[services.d] done.
Starting Plex Media Server.

Portainer Plex Binds

0 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport/Docker/appdata/plex:/config
1 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport/media/TV:/TV
2 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport/media/Movies:/Movies
3 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport/media/Music:/Music
4 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport/Docker/appdata/plex:/transcode

2

The directory pointed to by the docker Volume/Bind Mount /transcode is not the problem. In most cases it’s the directory pointed to by the docker Volume/Bind Mount /config. This directory needs to be located on a drive that is NOT mounted ‘noexec’.

Examine your /etc/fstab file mount directive for this drive (/srv/dev-disk-by-label-PiPassport). If it is mounted ‘noexec’, then the transcoder executables that are located on that drive will not run.

You can find instructions how to fix this properly over on the OMV users forum:

https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php/BoardList/

1 Like
3

Thanks. I removed the ‘noexec’ from the drive - found instructions on “technoDadLife” Youtube channel. The last part of those instructions failed because the command was depricated(?) in OMV. I found a solution for that on OMV forums.

Thanks for you expert advice.

Regards.

4

Things changed between OMV 4 and OMV 5. The OMV 4 command you probably tried to run after editing config.xml was

omv-mkconf fstab

But for OMV 5 it would be:

omv-salt deploy run fstab

5

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