I was able to watch the national and local news last night and also the MNF pre-game and 1st half without issue when MPEG2 support was turned off.
Today at lunch while it was enabled, the stream quit after 10-15 minutes.
It could be in my head, but it does seem like channels broadcast in 720p fail much quicker than channels broadcast in 1080i.
Interesting. I will test this as well.
I have seen this 33% buffering on Roku on both live OTA tv and recordings. If I stop the playback and restart, everything continues just fine for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes and then 33% starts again. I never see this when I am running Plex on my Firesticks so I think it is a Plex/Roku phenomenon. I am also looking for a solution.
Interesting. Iāve never had the problem occur with recordings.
Last night we were watching Thursday Night Football, and it played for almost 3 hours (tuned in for the pregame) before it failed the first time. Then played for about 20 minutes before failing again. Played fine the rest of the game. Itās so random, it really makes it hard to try and figure out whatās going on.
In my never ending attempt to possibly discover what is causing this issue, Iāve gone back to disabling MPEG2 on our Roku TV to have live TV transcoded. Iām going to give it a few more days, but, so far, we havenāt had any issues with the stream entering the 33% buffer of death. The stream did actually buffer once last night during Monday Night Football, but it resumed playback and worked flawlessly afterwards.
I have local quality set to original, so Iām not exactly saving any local bandwidth by transcoding, so I think this helps confirm that it probably isnāt a network issue. Iāve assumed this before, as local recordings playback just fine.
That is very interesting. I actually get the best overall performance by having all my video inside MPEG2 Video via pass through tvheadend.
Having PMS transcode live TV seems to solve the problem. We receive some channels that are broadcast AVC (MPEG4). Plex shouldnāt want to transcode those, and Iām going to see if the buffering error will happen when watching one of those channels. That might help narrow down the problem.
Itās been rock solid here since I disabled MPEG2 on our Roku devices. Our main living room TV utilizes a nVidia Shield which has no issue with MPEG2 either through Plex or the HDHomerun App directly.
The GPU cost of transcoding a single MPEG2 stream 1080i or 720p hovers around 6-8% on a GP107 chip (Quadro P400). My experience with utilizing Intel Quicksync for Plex transcoding has been very spotty since it seems to only kick in at random times. A P400 card seems to go for around $ 110 so for those with a PC based Plex server this is a very viable option to achieve decent transcoding capacity. Note that GP107 chips are limited to 2 simultaneous streams, for more than 2 streams you need to go up to the GP106 or better (Quadro P2000 and above) which has unlimited streams.
My server runs on an 8-core Atom (Intel C2750). It can handle 2-4 1080p transcodes just fine, but I still like to direct play/stream locally when I can. Thereās usually only one of us watching TV at a time (or together), so itās not that big of a deal, just kind of annoying that it doesnāt work the way it should.
At lunch I tuned into a channel that broadcast in MPEG4 and verified that Plex was direct streaming and not transcoding. I left it playing while I went back to work. over 5 hours later, itās still playing without issue. Direct streaming MPEG2 live would have no doubt already died. Will try to test again tomorrow.
I do believe the issue may be with MPEG2, but only when streaming live.
Same issue. Plex server is a new, high-end, HP box (i9 processor, 32G, 2TB) running Win10 pro, x64, and doing nothing else but Plex.
Plex client is AppleTv app.
Live TV stops every 3 or 4 minutes.)
All OS, Apps, Plex server are most recent versions.
Signal strength strong
Oct 19, 2019 12:25:25.163 [1488] ERROR - Exception handled: bad lexical cast: source type value could not be interpreted as target
Oct 19, 2019 12:25:36.133 [7528] INFO - AutoUpdate: no updates available
Oct 19, 2019 12:25:38.237 [14152] INFO - Notification: Recording Live TV - Session -
Oct 19, 2019 12:25:50.525 [9764] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01641.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:26:00.272 [1708] INFO - AutoUpdate: no updates available
Oct 19, 2019 12:26:22.555 [1708] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01673.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:26:53.551 [9764] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01704.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:27:22.523 [8504] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01733.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:27:57.592 [1488] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01768.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:26.561 [7528] ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: c:\Plex\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions\plex-transcode-e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b\media-01797.ts: write: A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous shutdown call
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:45.867 [1488] INFO - AutoUpdate: no updates available
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.628 [2888] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.697 [8504] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.766 [7528] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.835 [10848] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.916 [2888] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Oct 19, 2019 12:28:55.999 [9764] WARN - Failed to find consumer C59AEAAC-AE26-4F7E-BE73-919460796AB6 for session e5768683-f4e1-49d8-a9ef-bfa15473561b
Same problem with new appletv, windows Plex server and hauppage usb.
Re-enabled allow MPEG2 and my live TV stream failed out in about 10 minutes. Iāve attached logs below. When it started to fail (stuck at 33%), I checked out the console on the web interface and saw something about āPlexRelay.ā Not sure what that was about, but the logs should tell the entire store.
Iāve disabled MPEG2 and have been happily watching live TV since. Very odd.
Flawless with MPEG2 disabled for me so far after a few weeks. Going to keep it disabled.
Yep, we havenāt had any problems since disabling MPEG2. Obviously would prefer not transcoding, but now that the cool weather is here, I guess Iāll take the extra heat. 
My Roku TV updated to the latest Roku OS 9.2 and I decided to see if it played any better with MPEG2 live streams. Itās only been last night and this morning, but other than issues with audio/video sync on 1 channel, everything has been working well. Iāll keep testing and report back, but if you have the 9.2 update on your Roku device, you might want to re-enable MPEG2 and see how it works for you.
I think Iām ready to confirm that the latest version of PMS with Roku OS 9.2 has solved this problem. I havenāt had one issue with the stream stopping since re-enabling MPEG2 after the 9.2 update.
Been following this as Iāve had the same problem. But weāll see with the update. Just plugged my rokuās back in.
If they update to 9.2, I think youāll be good to go. I still have yet to have any issues.
I confirm the same findings. 13 hours running straight with absolutely no problem on direct stream. Thatās awesome, I can return my Mi boxes that I bought to go on my Roku TVs because of this issue. Was tired of transcoding 13 TVs lol.
