Lots of "An error occurred while attempting to play this video" problems

Plex Players Streaming Devices
, ,
1

Server Version#: 1.25.2.5319
Player Version#: 8.26.2.29839

I bought a Hisense TV on a Black Friday deal last month. It’s running Android TV (edited to add Plex player version).

I’ve been having all kinds of problems playing back content with two major issues in particular. The bigger of the two problems is that I keep getting the generic “An error occurred while attempting to play this video. Please check your connection and try again.” message for a lot of my videos. And I mean a LOT of them.

My pre-roll plays correctly (though that freezes at the end and I have to skip to the movie). But when it tries to load the movie, the error pops up. There’s a random few movies that play back without issue, but at least half of what I’ve tried so far result in the error message. Oddly, I don’t have this issue with my Shield TV, also running Android (obviously). My Samsung TV running Tizen also works correctly, as do a few Roku devices we have in the house. The issue is specific to the Hisense Android TV, which is the most irritating since it’s in my kids’ playroom and they have quite the meltdown if I promise to show them something and can’t get it to play.

Logs:
Plex Media Server.log.zip (62.6 KB)

The Hisense TV’s IP address is 192.168.1.171 in the logs. The borked playback attempt starts at around 13:09 for one movie and 13:11 for the other one (A Charlie Brown Christmas and Frosty The Snowman).

Later on, I played them back on my Shield TV (with IP 192.168.1.50 at 13:12 and 13:13 respectively). Those play back fine.

2

@Plan-B

In your logs (thanks for providing), I see the transcoder become active but am not seeing where the hardware transcoding is activating.

Do you have it enabled ?

If so, would you please do the following little script?

It gets the Plex token from your Preferences.xml file then uses it to turn on transcoder debug logging.

[chuck@lizum ~.2001]$ cat bin/set-transcoder-debug 
#!/bin/sh
Token="$(cat "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml" | tail -1 | sed -e 's/.*PlexOnlineToken="//' | sed -e 's/".*//')"
curl http://127.0.0.1:32400/:/prefs/set\?TranscoderLogLevel=debug\&X-Plex-Token=$Token
echo Token=$Token
[chuck@lizum ~.2002]$

After doing so, please recreate the playback failure.

3

I’m a bit of a Linux newbie, but when I try to run what you provided, I get:
cat: bin/set-transcoder-debug: No such file or directory

Also, my wife told me tonight that she can’t watch Grey’s Anatomy from the kitchen (which looks into our playroom). So, uh… this is now a high priority issue in this household.

4

Actually, that worked. I think. I see a lot of [Transcoder] lines in the log now.

Plex Media Server.zip (55.8 KB)

Also, if it helps. My PMS setup was previously running on a Samsung 250GB NVME SSD. As another Black Friday purchase, I upgraded to a newer, 2TB SSD specifically so I had enough storage to turn on thumbnails (I have no idea how I lived w/o them before). I used Clonezilla to clone the previous disk and then swapped it out with the newer one.

Any chance there was some permission that got hosed in the cloning process? It’s hard for me to really know if the issue would’ve existed on the older 250GB SSD because both the new TV and the SSD swap happened within a couple days of each other. Which means I didn’t really have much time to kick the tires and play a variety of content on the new TV before the SSD swap.

5

Aaaaannnnd… It’s fixed.

Saw in another thread that there was an app update released today. So I fired up Google Play to do a manual update and the issue seems to have been resolved by the latest release. The freezing on the last frame issue is gone and videos that popped the generic “an error occurred” message now play back.

6

Let me break this down for you… You need to learn it sometime.

1. [chuck@lizum ~.2001]$ cat bin/set-transcoder-debug 
2. #!/bin/sh
3. Token="$(cat "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml" | tail -1 | sed -e 's/.*PlexOnlineToken="//' | sed -e 's/".*//')"
4. curl http://127.0.0.1:32400/:/prefs/set\?TranscoderLogLevel=debug\&X-Plex-Token=$Token
5. echo Token=$Token
6. [chuck@lizum ~.2002]$

Lines 1 & 6 – These are my Linux command line prompt. I used cat to show you the file’s contents. You get to see what I named it but, more importantly, the script itself.

Lins 2-5 – The script itself

Line 6 – The next command prompt.

It was my intention to have you

  • take the script body,
  • put it in a file, as-written
  • save the file
  • chmod +x that-file-name (make it an executable script)
  • Run th escript to set your transcoder preference

Lots to learn.

1 Like
7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.