well I lost a recording tonight but for a different reason. I am assuming it is an EPG issue. A show ( Blacklist) disappeared from the EPG and the recording schedule. sigh.
@Cburn11 said:
Why don’t you just disable transcoding while recording? It doesn’t make any sense for plex to dump your entire program when there is an error; but since the feature doesn’t work very well, why do you keep it enabled and then complain that it doesn’t work very well?
@Cburn11 said:
That isn’t true.
Record a broadcast without “transcoding while recording” enabled and dump the resulting file. Nothing has been “transcoded”.
Just to clarify. Plex doesn’t do a pure capture of the tuner output per say but redirects into ffmpeg (plex transcoder) to segment the file into 1 second segments and do other real-time processing and “cleanup” of the “capture”. These segments are then available for live-tv use via HLS or DASH streaming. These segments are then combined back again to arrive at the final file. This final file will usually be similar but not the same as if you captured the output of the tuner with curl or similar (for hdhomeruns).
There is cleanup taking place through out this process with a “buffer” (90 minutes currently) of these segmented files. This is why you can’t record a 4 hour football game and start watching it 2 hours in and start at the beginning.
Plex up to version 1.61 did in fact use to direct copy the tuner output without this additional set of steps introduced. If the transcoder “hick ups” bad enough during this process you get the transcode error as seen above. It’s kind of a bogus message (sort of) in that it may not be “transcoding” in the pure sense of the word. But it’s a failure in the ffmpeg/transcoder executable dealing with the input. Put another way it’s a failure in the “middle ware” application. It’s much better than it used to be. In the early days a second or two of pixelation in the feed was enough to cause failures. It’s obviously still not error free however or you wouldn’t be getting these types of errors.
You CAN NOT turn of this way of Plex recording as it will ALWAYS involve the transcoder in the “capture” of the tuner output as this is now by design.
Hope that helps explain what you guys are seeing.
Not really explains what I am seeing…
I know the Transcoder is failing but I do not know why!!!
This has been going on since DVR was implemented.
I have supplied logs… and anything else needed in several other threads with this issue but it has NOT been even acknowledged by Plex until you entered this thread.
I have the same problem and today was particularly frustrating. Logs show the EPG error as well as a transcoding failure. I also have transcode while recording set to off.
If you’re seeing the transcoder error then most likely there is something in the stream that Plex doesn’t like, couldn’t handle and barfed on it. It could just be a hickup in the stream that lasts a second or two, but it’s enough to cause it to error out.
Frankly it’s close to impossible for us to figure this out since there isn’t enough info in the logs and the errors that do get thrown might be further up the chain then where the error actually occurred.
If either of you could reliably reproduce this then there is additional hidden settings that could be turned on to add more info to the log files but this causes them to be very hard to read and you need to grep them to find what you’re looking for. The logs grow like crazy so it’s not really of use unless you can reproduce this.
Out of curiosity are you guys recording OTA?
You are not the only one having issues with EPG and Transcendent errors. Hopefully a new release will sort this all out.
I think I found out what has been the issue for me.
As @Cayars mentioned, getting info into the logs on this issue is part of the problem.
As I trouble shot the issue here, the cause seemed to be a cable interruption.
It seems that if the media is not streamed or interrupted, the transcoder throws this error.
The log entries do not indicate any such failure. It just reports a Transcoder Failure.
I suspect this is the cause of many transcoder failure issues not correctly logged as such and DVR not being able to gracefully recover.
Keep an eye on it and time will tell if you got it fixed or not!
John, can you elaborate on what you meant by “cable interruption”?
@cayars
I am using a cable card with my HDHR…
I tried Live TV with HDGRAND SLAM and no stream.
The red light was on the HDHR.
I rebooted the HDHR and the Tuning Resolver for cable and now it is recording.
I will keep an eye on it for you if it re-ocurrs.
BTW do you know what Network Shatka error 1001 is??? Using hdgrand slam gives me this error and won’t play live TV…
https://shaka-player-demo.appspot.com/docs/api/shaka.util.Error.html
1001 = An HTTP network request returned an HTTP status that indicated a failure.
error.data[0] is the URI.
error.data[1] is the status code.
error.data[2] is the response text, or null if the response could not be interpretted as text.
error.data[3] is the map of response headers.
I seriously doubt if it’s the HDHomeRun causing the error. I use these tuners with lots of different software and only see that error in Plex land.
@cayars said:
If you’re seeing the transcoder error then most likely there is something in the stream that Plex doesn’t like, couldn’t handle and barfed on it. It could just be a hickup in the stream that lasts a second or two, but it’s enough to cause it to error out.Frankly it’s close to impossible for us to figure this out since there isn’t enough info in the logs and the errors that do get thrown might be further up the chain then where the error actually occurred.
If either of you could reliably reproduce this then there is additional hidden settings that could be turned on to add more info to the log files but this causes them to be very hard to read and you need to grep them to find what you’re looking for. The logs grow like crazy so it’s not really of use unless you can reproduce this.
Out of curiosity are you guys recording OTA?
Cayars,
I can reliably repeat the issue. Can you let me know what settings I can change?
I am recording OTA with a HDHomeRun EXTEND Model: HDTC-2US.
Sam
No setting that I’m aware of. This is a coding issue that the devs need to handle.
@cayars - Sorry let me re-phrase… Is there a config/setting change I can make to get the information that the devs need to fix the problem?
Not without being told what to turn on, no.
You need to know what to look for before turning on switches that flood the logs, otherwise you just make it so much harder to trouble shoot and go through log files like crazy!
@cayars said:
Not without being told what to turn on, no.You need to know what to look for before turning on switches that flood the logs, otherwise you just make it so much harder to trouble shoot and go through log files like crazy!
I can reliably reproduce the issue. If someone can tell me what to turn on as far as logging. I can turn in on a few minutes before the transcoder error and turn in off a few minutes after.
is it just verbose?
