What gives? I have an up-to-date Plex Server 1.14.0.5470 running on an Ubuntu 18.04 Server. Plex had been working for Live TV, but now all recording attempts end after a couple of minutes with a failure.
I noticed several forum posts about this problem, but first tried just viewing live TV to simplify the situation. And these sessions also end after a couple of minutes with a “playback error.” The same live TV sources viewed using the hardware and HDHomeRun app work fine with no playback errors.
The network between the HDHomeRun Connect source, Plex web interface on a Mac, and Ubuntu Server is all wired Ethernet. No WiFi involved. Music, movies, and previously recorded tv all work okay through Plex. Just not live tv. No major hardware changes from before when live tv did work to now when it doesn’t.
Any clues to the right direction for troubleshooting would be appreciated before diving into temp file locations, changing server settings from defaults, etc. Plus I’m not sure which of those approaches only apply to recordings versus live viewing.
I have solved this problem myself. This is what I did in case it might help others.
I simply used the Plex Web Interface and went to Settings (sidebar) and Transcode (sidebar). Then in Transcoder temporary directory (which had been empty) entered the same path as the location of my media files and “Transcode”. In my case this was “/srv/sharestorage2/Transcode”.
Done! A new “Transcode” directory using the same owner, group, and suitable permissions is created. Then stop and restart the Plex server.
My Ubuntu 18.04 Server’s boot disk is a LVM-formatted SSD. I assume Plex needed to write temporary files to that SSD and that’s what caused the problem. Whether limited capacity or LVM causing the issue is beyond my understanding. As is why this issue only started recently without any changes to disk format or hardware.
The bottom line is this new, specifically-identified Transcode location resolved the problem.
(After several days of success, I noticed something counter to what I had thought previously about no changes in my system. I had installed a VirtualBox virtual machine in my /home directory. Those things can be monstrous sizes and it probably seriously cramped Plex’s available space for transcoding. Removing it and reclaiming the storage space, then putting the Transcoder temporary directory back to its default location, would probably also work. But I do like having it in the same location as the media files, unless there is some advantage of a SSD versus HDD location.)
